Project: Dream Home

Its been exactly a year since we started building our dream home. In Bahrain, owning your home has always been a worry plaguing the minds of the people. My husband and I were lucky enough as my late father-in-law had a land from ages ago and gave it to his son, who had taken care of his parents for a very long time. Being the youngest of 8 children, his parents had reached retirement age when he first started working. So he paid the rent, he paid the bills and took care of everything for them. I'm really proud of him for that and I hope his kids will do the same.

He had always dreamed of building a home for himself and his parents, having lived in a rented apartment all their lives. When we started preparing the drawings for the house, his father passed away and gave him the land, which was all they had.

The land is about 70x60 foot. I can't say in numbers how much of that was used for the actual construction but the compound is around 2 meters wide in the front and around 1 meter on the sides and in the back.

We have two rooms downstairs from my ma-in-law, plus a bathroom, a small kitchenette and a separate entry door for her. We have 2 living rooms downstairs and a dining room plus a master kitchen. I wanted to have a connecting window between the two kitchens but the idea came too late as the wiring was already done.

What I really like is the room that we built on top of the garage. You take one flight of the main staircase and enter this room, which my husband calls the Function Hall. He wants to get a huge LCD TV with speakers in the wall and make it the main entertainment room!! We love it. Its also got a small balcony and from the outside it shows as a room between the two floors.

Upstairs, we have 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. A Laundry room and a storage room on the 3rd floor. All the tiling is completed. My daughter's bathroom is pink with a hearts border and my sons bathroom is white and green with rainbow borders! They love it but I think they still don't understand that this is the place we're going to move in to inshallah.

Now that we have finished the first stage of construction, Iwanted to take a step back and see how work has progressed, and what we need to do to complete our dream home.

We started back in November 2006, (so its now been a year) after taking a joint loan from the MInistry of Housing, which amounts to BD 40,000 max, we needed to take 2 other loans from the bank. We also need to take an additional loan to be able to go through the finishing and furnishing of the house.

We handed over the project to a contractor who charged us around BD 45,000 for the skeleton of the house. That was when we were laid back and relaxed. The contractor did everything and we just supervised. But after the initial stage is completed, we needed to follow up on every little detail from door knobs to light bulbs.

The kitchen is still in the back of or minds, we want to first finish all the bathrooms and gypsum work and then focus on the kitchen and its layout. We've already seen a kitchen we love and put a downpayment for it.

The gypsum boards have been put up, the walls now have primer on them. But thanks to Balexco, we still don't have windows. We had chosen chocolate brown aluminum for the window frames and some of the doors. But they decided in the last minute that our project was too small and so cancelled the order. We are now stuck. I'm sure everything will work out, we just need to find someone who has stock or something.

So the initial cost of the house came up to around BD 71,000. We still need an additional BD10,000 to be able to move in.

So until we are able to finance the project we continue to work with what we have.

I'm happy with the whole house, though I never expected it to be the way it is now. On paper, things are totally different!

Can't wait to move in...

Peace,

SoulSearch