Last week I told the tale of our struggle to find somewhere decent to live at a reasonable rent in Shunyi. The tale ended with us finding somewhere which, if not the apartment of our dreams, was at least liveable. Or so we thought.

I first noticed a problem when I plugged in the TV in the bedroom. “It doesn’t work,” I thought, but was not particularly concerned – having a TV in the bedroom is not high on my list of priorities. Then I realised that the TV was fine, it was the electric socket which didn’t work. Nor did many of the others. One was hanging out of the wall with bare wires showing.

This was worrying, but the real problems began the next morning. One of the main reasons for our choosing the apartment was its modern, western-looking bathrooms. However the showers produced only a dribble of icy cold water. We called the numbers we had been given, and a succession of workmen came, ran the water, tutted, tapped at things with screwdrivers, hummed, and left again. It was two days before we managed to communicate with anyone who could explain what the problem was.

The apartment uses solar power to heat the water in summer. So far, so green. However there had been a couple of cloudy days, so we had no hot water till the sun shone. And that, apparently, was that.

Finding the apartment and moving had been stressful, and this tipped us over the edge. My wife was ready to quit China right then and there, and just fly home. She would be the first to admit her Mandarin is limited, but she made her feelings known on this subject.

“没有热水, 不我的家,” she kept repeating to the estate agent. No hot water – not my home.

In the end we fled, not back to the UK, but to South Korea, where we spent a week recovering on the beach, while the landlord promised to make everything right. And on our return he had fixed the sockets and installed a water heater.

Happy ending?

Well, nearly. The socket came out of the wall again the first time I unplugged something from it. The water heater didn’t produce enough water pressure that you could actually use it to shower, and the builders had, inexplicably, taken away the bath plug, so you couldn’t use it for a bath either. The estate agent brought a plug which didn’t fit the hole, then, when we pointed out this problem to him, suggested we shove a sock into it.

My wife had a counter-proposal for him about where he could shove his sock, but fortunately he didn’t speak enough English to understand it.

I wish this story ended with some helpful information about how to negotiate with landlords, but the only advice I can offer is to check every single appliance when house hunting, find out where your hot water comes from – take nothing for granted. The truth is we just ended up sorting things out ourselves. We superglued the socket back to the wall, we found a universal bath plug on Taobao. Some things we’ve just decided to put up with. It is, in true Chinese fashion, 差不多 – chà bu duō, good enough.

Besides my day job for beijingkids, I also write a quasi-humorous column for The Beijinger, in which I take a sideways look at the magazine’s topic for the month. In July the topic was house hunting. However this was something I hadn’t yet experienced, since our first apartment in Beijing was provided for us by my wife’s school.

So I canvassed friends and colleagues for their apartment hunting horror stories, to use as material. I was deluged. Unfortunately the stories were variously depressing, shocking and frightening, and all completely lacking in any humorous potential. So I wrote instead a piece of frivolous nonsense about the “Central Baozi District” and a family of migrant workers living under the sink.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that finding our apartment in Shunyi was our first experience of house hunting in Beijing. And it was awful.

The first batch of apartments we were shown was clearly all the properties which had been literally gathering dust on their books for months. One contained a houseplant which had not only died, but had developed an afterlife in the form of a blossoming crown of mold.

Once we had worked through all of these, we moved onto the places which were just, well… strange. Whether they were so crowded with furniture you could barely move, smelling of fish, seemingly decorated by Dali, or looking like someone’s old granny had just died there and was probably laid out on a table in another room, none of them felt like home.

We thought our search had ended when we found a newly renovated studio apartment which was spacious, clean, and modern. Then we went up the stairs. The upper floor had apparently been planned by a toddler with a lego set. None of the walls connected with any others, so there were hardly any actual rooms, except for one which had a glass roof and wall and in summer could have been used as a slow cooker. There was a bathroom the size of the average living room, with a shower and a toilet at one, distant end, and nothing else in it… we could have wept. We nearly did.

To add insult to injury, everything seemed more expensive than apartments downtown. We found out why when we discovered the Lianjia app, and looked at the listings for the apartments we’d seen. They were all being advertised for substantially lower prices than we’d been quoted. The estate agents, on hearing that my wife is a teacher, had assumed we were on a massive housing allowance and jacked up all their prices. When we told them otherwise, one was so disbelieving he actually rang the school to check.

With the lease on our old apartment rapidly expiring, we finally found a place which was at least livable. The décor and furniture was relatively contemporary, the showers were in cubicles and appeared to have been installed this century, and the kitchen actually had western-style hobs, rather than the usual two huge burners the settings of which are “hot” and “feichang hot.” OK, it was on the fourth floor with no elevator, but you can’t have everything.

Did we all live happily ever after? Next week’s post will reveal the answer. But I think you can guess.

Photo: WhisperToMe via Wikimedia Commons