Finally Getting Somewhere With Getting Somewhere to Live! AKA: It's Officially Ours!!

Whew! What a busy few days the last ones have been! Let's see...where to start....

Ok, so on Monday we were supposed to turn in our pre contract to the housing office at 2:30pm. She called me around noon and told me to meet her at the Dome. I did and went to meet her. She tells me that the landlord does not want to pay for internet or cable. Ok, not a big deal. We do not want cable anyway and do not mind paying for internet. Especially since it will only be about $30 or so a month. Not a big deal! So our realtor calls the property manager and is asking when we can get the pre-contract and everything. So what it comes down to, is we end up going to meet the property manager at her work office to hopefully pick up the pre-contract. We get there and the manager tells us she has been trying to talk to the landlord all morning but he is not picking up or answering her texts. He told her he would be in a meeting but she had hoped he would be out sooner.

Getting a Place to Live......It Doesn't Always Work Out as Planned!

So, as it sometimes goes, the first place we had chosen to live fell through. This happened for multiple reasons:

1. I was never truly in love with the whole place, just really the master bedroom closet =)
2. The landlord was not only not willing to negotiate almost anything on our list (which we were fine
     fine with), but he also did not want us moving the furniture around. Um, hello? Who does that?!
3. Our realtor showed us two perfect places after we found out about the "no moving furniture" thing!

So You're Going to Live in Bahrain....? You Can Negotiate Your Lease!

So before we ever got to Bahrain, I had been told how renting here was different than in the states. You can negotiate what a landlord provides for you! Now I’m not talking, ‘Hey, we lived here for a year already and if you make our rent go up $100 then we are leaving,’ type of negotiating. No. I am talking, ‘Hey, a 55-70” LED HD SMART TV would sweeten the pot,’ kind of negotiating. Crazy, right? I think it might be because so many people decide not to bring their entire household with them an just put a good amount into storage. Unfortunately, for us, we did bring almost our entire household and only put a few things into storage. So we will have lots of extras that we either can't use because they are not dual voltage or just won't have room (unlikely though). We mostly asked for stuff we don't really have anyway.