Did We Find Our New Home??? Maybe

A noisy motorcyclist just gunned his machine up the street below, making enough noise to wake someone up. Living on a side street where these assholes can’t make a racket is one goal in moving to a permanent home in Taichung. It has been a priority in assessing the nine units we have seen so far. The second priority has been assessing the mosquito annoyance. It is my conclusion that it is quieter and there are fewer mosquitoes at units on higher floors. At the two units we saw yesterday, the first was on the 8^th floor and on a quiet lane. The second was on the fourth floor off an industrial two lane road. Both were behind a field of bamboo and weeds and an open sewer, a favorite breeding spot for mosquitoes!. Leona fell in love with the second one and didn’t like the first! I like the second one, too. She is ready to go back to American to transfer funds for a down payment!

Half of the 73 ping of the 22 year-old condo on the fourth floor of the eight floor building was outdoors on two enormous patios. One patio has a corrugated steel roof and soundproof sealed windows. It would be perfect for a hothouse and Jacuzzi bathtub and would hold a pool table or ping-pong table comfortably if it weren’t going to be so hot and steamy in it in the summer. It must be about 40’x20’. The other patio is uncovered with a four foot high tiled cement ledge punctuated by every six inches by yellow vertical one-inch wide wooden sticks of varying lengths glued or hammered into the ledge making the ledge a half foot higher and cat-proof. That patio is also about 40’x20’. On that patio we could put a barbeque and picnic table and plants.

You enter the unit through the living room. The ceiling in the living room has crown molding around the perimeter and an elliptical medallion over the swinging area above the entrance door. The room is 20’x13’ with a 9’ ceiling. There is a 10’x4’ balcony on the far right side. The balcony is in the courtyard of building on a right angle to a neighbor’s balcony. You can look into his window on the left a few feet from our balcony. To the left side of the entrance there would be a dining area. The ceiling has a large 4’ diameter inverted circular medallion with a chandelier hanging from its center. To the left of the dining area there is a Japanese tea room (!) complete with 2’ high wooden floors. The 10’x10’ room has a window on the patio and sliding wooden doors facing the dining area. To the right of the Japanese tea room (perhaps a guest or reading room to us) there is a 4’ wide 6’ long hallway. Immediately to the right off the hallway is an 8’x6’ bathroom with sink, toilet and shower. Beyond the bathroom, to the right, there is a 12’x10’ room with a 2” raised wooden floor; this would be our office/library. To the left of the bathroom down the short hall is the master bedroom which includes another private bathroom to its left with a shower, sink, and toilet. There is a window in the bathroom on the open patio between the window from the Japanese tea room and the large sliding doors in the master bedroom that open on to the outdoor patio. The master bedroom is about 15’x13’ with large built in closets to the right. Actually, there is a built in bed baseboard, night tables, and vanity, too, which we would probably replace.

Going back to the main entrance in the living room, on the right of the dining area, there’s the kitchen. The kitchen is small and long, perhaps 10’x4’. There is a two burner stove and a sink with a chip-wood counter and a space for a refrigerator. The kitchen would have to be remodeled. There is a long flexible aluminum flue that extends from over the range along the wall beyond the kitchen, passed a 6’x4’ area for a washing machine and through the enclosed patio and out the patio window. The flue must be about 20’ long! There’s also an exhaust pipe for the carbon monoxide from the water heater that is located in the washing room area that goes out that same window. The price for all this is 6.4 million NT, about $220,000us. Leona says she can bargain it between 5.8 ($200,000) and 5.5($180,000.) Jenny, her friend, will be our agent and is asking for 1% commission instead of the usual 2%. By the way, it also includes the price for an indoor garage spot under the building, a spot that is on the bottom slot of an electrical car lift! The grounds in the courtyard are small but landscaped. There is one elevator up a fight of seven steps.

On the outside of the inconspicuous condominium a block of Dong-Shan road on Shu-Jing Street, just down the block from the chow-tofu place where we always eat is not a very pretty picture. As is so often the case in Taiwan, the condominium is across the street from some factory warehouses with a forklift or two plying the winding two lane two-way street and some wooded bamboo area behind it.. To the south, it winds across a small wash and into a nice area of new million dollar concrete homes. Leona’s brother’s building is not more than a mile away. To the north, a block away, is all the shopping and restaurants we like on Dong-Shan Road. It would be convenient to ride the bicycle to American Eagle in the west or along the Han River winding north and south. The entrance to the building is on a lane which is ugly in front of the building with a weed-strewn vacant lot in front of a few ugly half-painted three-story buildings, the same buildings we would look out to the north fifty feet away from the open patio. We would see those buildings standing up on the patio, unless we are sitting on chairs, in which case, 80% of the landscape off the open patio would be sky. If you look east down from the enclosed patio, you can see the small one floor warehouses but if you look up and out, there is a nice green bamboo grove with some nice new three story private homes and the first condominium we say earlier yesterday morning. Beyond that, a few miles away, is the mountain range. On the first floor of the condo, on the corner, is an ugly auto/cycle repair shop with old vehicles and tires strewn about. The entrance to the condo has a doorman twelve hours (8am to 8pm) and a pass the rest of the time. There is an ugly meeting room which you pass through before you turn left to the short flight of stairs to the elevator to out unit. The stairway to the basement garage is on the left in the courtyard just beyond a small pool with a dozen large fish. I would have to carry my bicycle up those steps to get into the elevator or perhaps leave it outside near the fish pond chained to something, as a few other residents have done. The hall outside our refurbished entrance door has a stairway around the elevator which may also be a place I could chain up my bike, though it would be a hazard in a fire. Nevertheless our one other fourth floor neighbor has shoes and a bicycle on their side of the small 10x4’ hall. Our unit is one of two units that benefits from such large patios because of the construction of the building that has extra room on the first to third floors.