The Garden Wedding

Having gotten our keys to the flat for a couple of weeks now, we’ve done practically NOTHING to our flat as yet. And why is that so? Simply because our dear HDB – the ONLY source for public housing in Singapore, does slip-shod work in building their flats. And who pays for it? The people who fork out HUGE amounts of money, almost a life-time of savings, to buy their bloody lousy flats – US. Yup, you heard me right, HDB DOES REALLY SLIP-SHOD and SLOPPY work. Or perhaps they might argue, it’s not their fault you know, afterall, it’s not HDB who builds the flats, the contractors whom they hire does the work.

And how do they engage the contractors? Give it to the lowest bid! I believe that everyone in their right minds would know that everything comes with a price. And the lowest price for something, more often than not, does not translate into something really worthwhile. Pay $400 to hire people to paint your house for example, instead of paying $1000. Then be extremely prepared to fork out another $1000 in the future to re-paint your home, as the people who do it for $400 will only do a substandard job which is unlikely to pass the layman’s expectations. A perfect alternative would be to do it yourself, if you have the time and effort to that is, if you’re not already tired out from working your ass off to pay for the house in the 1st place. In any case, it’s not like HDB forks out a huge amount of money to pay for the construction of the flats in the first place, given the enormous price tags they put to their flats. So why go to the extreme of giving the tender to the lowest bidding contractor? *disgusted*

I think I’ve not arrived at the main point after having ranted for so long. The whole POINT is, the pipes in our ‘new’ house were found LEAKING like crazy in the kitchen and bathroom. And after having complained to HDB about it, they sent contractors down to fix the problem, and guess what? The contractors left the water running (even after we’ve told them – the contact person for the contractors, the specific place where we observed the leakage) overnight, therefore staining our walls, up’ed the bills and somewhat made things worse. And they claimed they were looking for the source of the leakage – letting the water run OVERNIGHT? What a joke. PLUS, the pipes are concealed in the walls, how do you see where the water is leaking out from without removing the tiles???

Fine, so they said they’d make our leakage a priority to fix, as they say there are many other defects in the HDB flats in our estate they have to deal with. Haha, see what I mean about the flaw in getting the lowest bid to do the job? Fantastic. Whoo hoo. So clever. And it’s been a week since we complained about the running of water overnight (and almost 2 weeks since we first complained about the leaking water), and the progress is painfully SLOW. When asked about the progress, the contact person says she doesn’t know how it is as she’s not the one doing the job (so what IS she doing? Just answer the calls and tell the angry homeowners that somebody is working on their problems? There’s no need to communicate with the contractors is there?), and when asked further to check it out, she said she’d call us to update us on the progress. How naive we are to believe her. She hasn’t gotten back to us at all. And it’s the weekend, so guess we have to wait til Monday?

Perhaps while reading this, some of you may wonder, isn’t HDB going to bear the cost for fixing the defects, and so there is no problem whatsoever? In the first place, we BOUGHT the supposed ready-to-live-in house but found defects, and hence the seller, i.e. HDB, has every damn responsibility to fix it (and pay for it of course). The costs that they do not have to bear however, are the feelings of anxiety, anger and worry, as well as the inconvenience caused to us over the repairs (we have to go down to our new flat from time to time to take a look at what is going on don’t we? That takes TIME, EFFORT and MONEY), and wondering when we can start furnishing the new home. Painting, installation of lights, building of the kitchen cabinets and washing of the house CANNOT begin until they have fixed the leaking pipes and water-stained walls. So everything is delayed, and time and inconvenience is what HDB doesn’t compensate us for.

Angry? Frustrated? These are mere understatements of how we feel right now.