Umi is back
For the last 2 weeks, our nanny Umi has been visiting her family in Java. Usually she goes for Idul Ftri (at the end of Ramadan) which was earlier in the year. This year, she didn’t go then due to Covid 19.
Border security??
Umi just came back on a bus from Java. She does this trip every year. The bus drives onto a ferry to cross between Java and Bali. When it arrives in Bali, she always has to show her Bali ID card. However, this time, even though the government has announced stricter regulations due to corona, not only did she not have to show her ID, she also wasn’t asked for a corona rapid test. Perhaps it was an aberration, but it doesn’t bode well.
Metal mosquito net?
I love how our feature wall looks from the outside. However, it also needs to be functional…. and one thing I need is an enclosed living room. I lived with an open living and while it’s great for a holiday, I don’t want the creepy crawlies getting in.
So, at the moment we’ve got a lots of arch shaped bricks with large holes in them. I need to cover them on the inside or all the mosquitos are going to have a party in my living room. Originally, I planned to put glass on the inside. But, I’ve been thinking about using an alternative barrier – a metal mosquito net. It’ll let through the breeze and keep out the bugs. I’ve also been experimenting with it to check it’ll stop the rain. Fingers crossed!
It isn’t always glamorous but power points need to be bought!
Homeless?
We’re running out of time. Our lease expires very soon. We don’t want to move to temporary accommodation for a month or so until our villa is ready. The landlord of our current villa can be difficult to deal with. While we don’t have contact with him on a day to day basis, he’s always looked for ways to get extra money out of us. We hadn’t wanted to extend our lease in our current villa but it looks like there won’t be much choice.
So we’ve been chatting with our landlord about continuing our current lease and paying monthly. Not surprisingly he quoted prices that were less than reasonable pre-corona, let alone now! Nowadays, 1000s of villas are sitting empty, so we’ll have to negotiate hard to get the price down. Interesting negotiations coming up…
Money talks!
We’ve spent a lot of time on the build and definitely don’t want to rush the final stages. It’s these final finishes that will make an enormous difference. We’d rather stay another month or 2 in our current villa than rush to move in before our current lease expires. Our build contract says that it should have finished in 6 months. We knew this was totally unrealistic and we presumed it would 9-10 months. We had a year left on our lease when we started building, so that was our fall back position. We planned to get it done before our lease expires.
When we prepared our building contract, we insisted that we are able to withhold payment if it runs over-schedule. Importantly, we included this in our contract. We never intended to hold any payments as long as the build was done to our standard within a reasonable timeframe. 6 months was a pipe dream. But 12 months was our limit due to our current lease.
However, that doesn’t really matter, as we won’t be paying for any monthly lease extensions ourselves. That money is coming out of the remaining payment we owe our builder. We’ve explained it clearly to him. He needs to get more workers to the site asap, and get the job done!
Sheila
