Well, i'm officially sticking with Shiv and Kart and the 3 of us are moving out together. Some reshuffling took place, and my decision to not find my own place has now made the 3 of us potential new housemates.

I saw a HDB in Bukit Merah, just to have a gauge of how it would be like. I wasn't impressed. The neighborhood was old, so it was comparatively more run down than the average HDB block, but I wasn't particularly worried about that. I saw the actual place, and I guess it was somewhat dis-used, but what really made my mind up was the locked room. I'm told there's a grey market of HDB flats that have a locked room whereby owners get around paying for a permit from HDB when they want to rent their flat out by claiming they still live in that flat from time to time, therefore they keep one room locked with their belongings in there. I found that particularly disconcerting that I would be living in a house that wasn't mine, that had an empty room that was always locked, of which i had no inkling of what was inside that room - made worse by the fact that i would be living alone.
A single bedroom flat was extremely hard to come by, and i was told by a few agents that technically single bedroom flats can only be rented out by HDB themselves to specific people who qualify, e.g. elderly folk without any family. So my best bet was either a 2 bedroom flat, with 1 locked room, or a studio apartment - of which i decided i could not afford.
So that was it, that summed up my options, so i decided i'd stick with Shiv and Kart.

Shiv has been hard at work the past couple of days looking for suitable apartments. He's facing the exact problems i faced - agents not bothering to call you back, apartments already taken by the time the print ad comes up, or the irritating problem when you call so many numbers that by the time one of them actually calls you back, you have no idea which apartment the number that's calling you back now would be regarding.
But anyway we've made a bit of progress, and we've viewed 2 apartments so far, one in Spottiswoode Park and one in Oxley. The 1st was an upgraded HDB, it was spacious, was on a high floor and in a very convenient location, but my God, the toilets.... the toilets.... were.... horrendous... old, tiles cracking, paint peeling, and dank...; the latter was an old walk-up apartment that was also in a very good location, the apartment itself was old but looked reasonably comfortable, but the problem was that the 3rd room was horrendously small, and that about settled it because none of us were willing to even accept staying in that room.
So we're still waiting for that perfect apartment to come along.
The 2nd apartment was a revelation as well, as i thought from there it was clearly evident the differences in priority between me and Shiv & Kart. Shiv & Kart would rather a livable place in an awesome location, so their expectations of the house was lower than mine, but for me i'd much rather a good apartment in a reasonable location, so my expectations of the house were significantly higher, but i was much more willing to accept longer travel times than the 2 of them.
My justification was that I'd much rather find a place that i want to come home to, and slightly longer travel times weren't an issue to me, as long as we were well connected and didn't have to change 3 or more buses or trains to get to work or home.
Hopefully we'll find a place that's good for all 3 of us, in a location that would satisfy the 2 of them, and a house that's habitable by my comparably lofty standards (gulp).

Boy, finding a new place to stay isn't fun at all....
Guess its a "Welcome to the real world" slap in the face, but gosh i used to think it was so much fun going around with my family looking at showrooms and showhouses, soaking in their design ideas and architectural innovations - it was fun because it was always nice to go around and comment on what other people have done, especially when you yourself have no pressing need for that place in particular.

I used to grumble under my breath on my dad's comments too. I used to get extremely irritated when he goes into a big house and then complains that it was too big and that he'd be afraid to live in such a house, yet when he finds a slightly smaller house, he'd complain that it was too small and that he could buy a much bigger place for the same price. Which probably explains why we haven't moved from where we live in... 12 years?

As for me, i guess my contract is expiring at a somewhat inconvenient time now that the property market is bullish again. I was actually kinda worried when i got an agent to look for a place for me, as i was terrified that he would laugh out loud when i told him my budget :/ Thank God the agent was really down to earth and suggested that a HDB was definitely more suited for my budget, it was just a matter of finding one as it wasn't easy to find 1-bedroom HDBs out for rent these days, especially one that would fit my tight budget...
I found a few online property ads that sounded like really good deals, almost too good to be true, and was informed by my agent after he checked up on a couple of them that they may be dummy ads - and that kinda iff'ed me. I suppose there is no free lunch, but it sometimes irritated me the distance over-zealous agents would go to get any kind of solicitation, by quoting an ad that would undoubtedly catch people's attention with a fantastic price, and when people call he would take down their details but 'disappoint' them by saying the unit was already taken, but would offer his services to find other similar units or whatever the client so fancied.
Therefore, on the advice of my agent, I decided to rely more on the newspapers and print classified ads, as they cost more to put up so the likelihood of dummy ads was significantly lower. Unfortunately for me the only copy of newspapers i had sitting around was my recruitment section of papers i had from a couple of weeks ago, i thought i'd try my luck anyway. Lo and behold, my ego took a BIG hit when I called one of the ads to enquire, and the guy on the other end of the line must've been thinking "Which planet did you just land from?" when he didn't even wait for me to finish my sentence and replied "Oh that one ar? *snort* It's been taken LooooOOoooOOoooOOOoooOOoooOOoooOOOoooOOOoooOOOooOOOoooOOOng ago loh.... "
I made a quick, bashful "Oh thank you" and immediately hung up to save myself anymore humiliation. Affordable 1-bedroom apartment in convenient location from the classified ads 2 weeks ago, WHAT THE BLAZES WAS I THINKING?! -_-"

Better keep my fingers crossed i'll be able to find a good one before time's up, or i'll have to probably see if i can negotiate out some sort of deal with the guys and see if i can squeeze back into their plans - which i'm not that keen as though economies of scale with a few people in the house are definitely a plus, it might be back to square one in terms of privacy, cleanliness and freedom.
If anyone's got a genuine deal for a 1-bedroom apartment that's reasonably connected to the rest of Singapore, do let me know in the newly set up flooble chatterbox in the sidebar (I've got ample time, so i'll be checking back to my blog quite frequently - and i'll hopefully have the inspiration to update my blog too).