My Journey to purchase an apartment in Bangalore

Well, let me tell you how it happened for me. I started looking for a house in early 2003 in Bangalore. That was the time when people used to say HSR layout is a mosquito infested area and that was the time when the per sqft rate of land in HSR Layout was around Rs 400/- in Sector 5.


But I was not looking to purchase land. Me and my friend started looking for apartments in and around whitefield, Brookfield, outer ring road and Sarajapur road area. We came across a number of apartments (Gopalan Habitat, Sriram Spandana, Springfield, Akme harmony etc). But when we enquired about the price, we thought that it was always out of reach by 3 to 4 lacs. To give you a perspective, Gopalan was available for 14 lacs, and Springfield was around 23 lacs. Call it lack of outlook, call it shortsightedness… we didn’t buy at that time. In between we tried few other apartments in JP nagar area including Brigade Millennium. But it was not meant to be.

After that I went to US and completely forgot about buying an apartment in Bangalore. When I came back in 2006, I again started searching for an apartment to buy. But it was too late. The prices were sky rocketing and nothing was available. I made a valiant attempt to purchase one unit in Mid Way City (Concode group). Even I paid up the advance. But later on got convinced by couple of my friends that staying in a rented house is a more economical solution then purchasing (in my case). Hence I backed out of it. But today I am a proud owner of an apartment in Salarpuria Serenity.



So what made me change my mind? Well not a single factor.

1. The foremost point was the attitude of the owner where I was staying in rent. He behaved as if he was doing a charity by renting the house to me. He increased the rent at his own wish and if I protested, he simply asked me to leave if I do not want to pay. House owners also understand that it’s a good 20K expense if you need to move from one house to another (transportation, painting charges etc). And a huge inconvenience (changing kids school, changing addresses everywhere, getting used to a new area, finding a new cook, finding a new maid and the list goes on). So my house owner also tried to take advantage of it and I had to oblige to all his wishes.

2. I changed my job and got a hike. Which made my affordability slightly better.

3. All of a sudden we realized that we can sell of one of the lands that were lying in my home town and utilize that money

4. We were planning to have a kid

5. I gave up the idea to go to US again after the 2008-2009 slump.

All these above factors combinedly tilted the balance in favor of purchasing a house.
And yes, I purchased the apartment in HSR Layout only (once the mosquito infested area, now the most sought after location in south Bangalore)...

Painting Kids Room - Mission Accomplished

Once the woodwork was done, I was looking to paint my daughter’s room. I was looking to paint it with some Disney characters. I searched a lot, contacted a lot of people who paints, but none of them knew how to paint the way I was looking to get the room painted. I am talking about Bangalore here, in other cities it might have been a different case.

After searching for some more time, I finally came across nerolac paint’s website http://www.nerolac.com/index.jsp?page=company/disney which claims that they do paint Disney characters and they do have service available in Bangalore. I got the toll free number 1800 2200 24. To my disappointment it went to a voicemail. Hoping against the hopes I left a message with my contact number and location. To my surprise I did receive a call within 2 days. I fixed up an appointment. Two guys came with a catalog which contains few options. Better then not able to get it done at all. Finally I selected one option and asked them to give me the quote. They took the measurement of the house and quoted around 13.5K which included painting 2 walls with cartoon characters and painting the whole room pink.

They took around 2 days (actually 3 days. one day they didn’t turn up due to some reason) to complete the painting. I must say that I was quite happy to see the end result. I think my daughter’s room looked really nice after it was painted with the nice Donald duck and pooh. The name of the person who did the painting was Jai Singh and his contact number is 9880315154. See some of the photos that I have taken of the room after it was done.