Housing Loan

Alhamdulillah, there is now more than one islamic financing option for the HOS (Home Ownership Scheme) loan provider for BSP. Well, for my non-muslim friends who are not concerned about interest i.e. non-muslims, then you'd have lots of option as HSBC, SCB and OUB are some of the banks which has HOS arrangement with BSP. And for those not in BSP, then you have a much bigger option.

Tips? Look for bank who offers subsidies, some up to $6k to cover for the initial expenses i.e. Mortgage Insurance, Valuation fees and Legal fees.... and of course, for the non-HOS, compare the interest rates of every banks (for HOS, you don't need to worry as BSP pays for much of the interest, i think you only need to pay 1.25%?)

Oh yes, as of yesterday (Saturday) afternoon, the builders are stil preparing the mould for the footing, and had to pump lots of rain water out of the footing hole, and also had to excavate the soil that fell in the hole due to the heavy rain in Friday nite. Met with the builder boss this afternoon and he is still confident that the foundation laying ceremony planned for this Friday will remain unchanged.... Yaawwwnnnnn, been a long weekend. good nite buddies and wassalamualaikum.

Piling Done

Finally, the piling work has been done. hehheh, sorry, i was supposed to serialised this house construction, so it should have been the 'cari batu' or ensuring the land boundary and then clearing of the land and then levelling bla bla but yesterday, the piling works (64 piles of 9m) was finally completed.

The picture doesn't show much as the piles are buried 3 feet further into the ground.

What do you need to build your own house?

There is no clear references (and if there are, then it is not well promoted) on how one can build a house. Well, common sense says that you need a land of your own, and design, and of course money. but how about processes if you have all?

I for one, was lucky in the sense that my mom left me a piece of land to build a house, and together with my wife, we have some savings so part 1 & 3 above are covered. We do have our own thoughts about how it'll look like but sought a professional architect to realise our thoughts to the design plan and get approval from authorities.

Once you got that, then it's time to choose your contractor - you have to ask around, look at current house constructions and ask the workers who their boss are. in our case, our architect has a list of contractors and he told us which contractors build the current constructions so we could see for ourself the quality of work. Just our luck, a friend of mind just had her house completed and we looked at the workmanship, and it was good. So we asked around and i think about more than 10 houses by the same contractor (some which was completed over 7 years ago) and they have no complaints with the contractor except for the price. We were also told that the contractor is very pro-active in helping us choosing material, and making necessary changes to the design. So, we decided to go along with him! Other contractors were cheaper but, from our queries (to the disgruntled owners of course) is that they had arguments with the owners and some owners had to drag the contractors to court (due to unreasonable delays) and quite funny but true, in one construction of a friend's house, halfway during the construction, the contractor decide to only communicate with the owner by SMS following an argument!

Anyway, enough for now and my next blog would then be, OUR HOUSE!