Owning a house can be a very enlightening experience. Prior to owning a house, I didn't expect the amount of money that I would need to fork out to make a brand new house complete. For buyers of new houses i.e. houses which you buy from developers, what you get is a house minus the fittings. And that means minus the lighting, grilles, curtains / blinds, cabinets, etc - unless some are thrown in as part of the purchase deal.

We bought an apartment and had approximately 11 lighting points. Naturally, we would want to have decent looking lamps to match the furniture that we have at home. I don't want a cheap looking single flourescent tube to light up the living room after spending a few thousand on the living room furniture. It just does not look right. So, we had to do some serious shopping and shopping we did. I think my wife and I visited no less than 8 lighting shops around town.

We saw some really fancy ones not unlike fine art lamps or hinckley lighting but found them a bit too elaborate. Nice but they don't blend with the furnishing we had in mind. Finally, we settled on lamps from one of the better known chain of lighting shops in Malaysia (which has since closed down actually) and spent approximately one grand on 11 pieces of lighting points. I never knew lighting could be so expensive! I will think twice about staying on a landed double-storey house which probably comes with 20 to 30 lighting points!


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