The Keys

The House (will be painted soon to get rid of this hideous color combination)

We drove to Selangor yesterday where our lawyer is located to pick up the keys for the house as the owner had gone and collected his final check earlier in the morning. Here in Malaysia, handing over ‘the Keys’ signifies the end of the sale, like the ‘closing’ in the US. We were surprised we didn’t have to sign any documents at the end, I guess because we signed so many months ago; we just went to pick up the keys.

And impressive the Keys were, all 16 of them. Satisfied everything was complete R and I left the lawyer’s office in a brilliant mood, we finally owned the house! Thought we would stop off at Ikea and pick up a couple tabletops we are going to use for our office as the Lawyer’s office is close to Ikea. So we bought the items and headed back to Seremban.

We drove to the house to drop off the items. Excited that the house was now ours, we walked up to the front door and I let R do the honors of unlocking it. He started going through the keys and none of them were working, as he came closer to the 16^th key, he joked that he bet it was the last key. But alas, no. None of the keys worked on the front door and the grill’s (external gates) lock on the back door didn’t work either. We tried and tried and none of the keys worked. So we called a locksmith and he eventually came, confirmed we weren’t wrong... the keys looked to him like internal keys for bedrooms and bathrooms, not external doors. So the locksmith proceeded to unlock the front door and saw off the back grill lock. After this long grueling process of breaking into our new home, the excitement had faded. After he was finished, about all we could do was drag the ikea boxes into the house, re-lock the house with our new grill locks and go back to the rental condo, tired, hungry and full of bug bites. But the HOUSE IS OURS!!!

Today has been much more productive, we went and ordered the Panasonic refrigerator, the Tuscani standalone cooker and hood and guess what? They delivered all three to the house this afternoon. Our kitchen contractor B stopped by and we signed the kitchen contact with him too... he said his part of the kitchen will be done in 3 weeks (not including the installation of the marble countertops)!!! We aren’t too optimistic about this deadline, but at least he is starting.