With great naivety we came to Siem Reap expecting to find a comfortable house with a western kitchen and decent bathroom. We expected this to all be a short walk from the central Siem Reap area.
What a shock we had when we started house hunting. We were taken by motorbike and tuk tuk all over the city down small dirty trash filled dirt lanes full of potholes and mud. We were taken to places which were full of mice and cockroaches and then told a monthly rental amount that was well out of our budget.
The bathrooms in Cambodia leave a lot to be desired. Usually they are a tiny room with your shower hanging over the toilet. Perhaps a good setup if you are in a hurry to get up and go to work and want to do several things at once, but certainly not the most comfortable to use every day especially if the floor stays wet for hours after you use the shower. The decorations also leave a lot to be desired. Here is an example of a quite spacious bathroom at a house we looked at renting.
After weeks of looking around we were starting to give up. Reality very quickly took over from our preconceptions. We would be happy to find anywhere with two bedrooms a bathroom and a living room and kitchen.
Eventually we heard of a place via a facebook group and went to look. It is the middle flat in a group of nine and is a skinny place going up three floors. It had everything our much lower expectations needed. It even had a shower which was NOT over the toilet. Amazing!
The only catch was that the place would come totally empty and in a huge mess. There was months of grime and dust all over the place.
We took the place and spent days mopping, scrubbing and cleaning the place. Thank goodness we got our tetanus injections before leaving Australia!
Anyway, after a lot of effort and days scouring Siem Reap for furniture we started transforming the apartment. Our bedroom went from this:
Finding a soft mattress proved to be nearly impossible. Everything in Cambodia can be fixed or made with concrete. Their mattresses are no exception. There are pages on facebook of ex-pats discussing where they could get a soft mattress. We followed every lead down and eventually found a place with a memory foam mattress. They wanted about $1600 Australian dollars for one. Way out of our price range. We hunted some more and eventually found an affordable place which had a mattress we could test and it was ok. They arranged for a mattress to come from Thailand to Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. After 3 days the mattress arrived and we tested it out on our new bed. HARD AS A ROCK! We found that they'd ordered a different one from what we had tested and were hoping we'd be ok with the cheaper harder mattress. No we were not. After another inter country mattress run we had a softer one but they were not happy about taking the first one back and wanted us to buy two. Eventually we sorted it out and can finally get a full night's sleep.
Our living room and dining room went from this:
Our kitchen still leaves a lot to be desired:
But in the mean time we have set this up inside as an alternate kitchen:
So as you can see, after a lot of work we have made our selves reasonably comfortable. Stan even has an office where he can write these blogs.
What a shock we had when we started house hunting. We were taken by motorbike and tuk tuk all over the city down small dirty trash filled dirt lanes full of potholes and mud. We were taken to places which were full of mice and cockroaches and then told a monthly rental amount that was well out of our budget.
The bathrooms in Cambodia leave a lot to be desired. Usually they are a tiny room with your shower hanging over the toilet. Perhaps a good setup if you are in a hurry to get up and go to work and want to do several things at once, but certainly not the most comfortable to use every day especially if the floor stays wet for hours after you use the shower. The decorations also leave a lot to be desired. Here is an example of a quite spacious bathroom at a house we looked at renting.
After weeks of looking around we were starting to give up. Reality very quickly took over from our preconceptions. We would be happy to find anywhere with two bedrooms a bathroom and a living room and kitchen.
Eventually we heard of a place via a facebook group and went to look. It is the middle flat in a group of nine and is a skinny place going up three floors. It had everything our much lower expectations needed. It even had a shower which was NOT over the toilet. Amazing!
The only catch was that the place would come totally empty and in a huge mess. There was months of grime and dust all over the place.
Anyway, after a lot of effort and days scouring Siem Reap for furniture we started transforming the apartment. Our bedroom went from this:
to this:
to this:
Our living room and dining room went from this:
to this:
Our kitchen still leaves a lot to be desired:
But in the mean time we have set this up inside as an alternate kitchen:
So as you can see, after a lot of work we have made our selves reasonably comfortable. Stan even has an office where he can write these blogs.
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