Thursday, May 22, 2014

Back And Forth, To Buy Or Not To Buy?

I am going back and forth, back on forth on whether to buy a condo in Thailand. I hope to spend extended periods of time there in the coming years, maybe up to 6 months a year. A condo in Bangkok would allow me to store my equipment in the country and also to set up a small film developing darkroom which means I could develop all my film there and bring back the negs to Canada to do the fine printing (no xray machine worries). My latest go around on this has me buying an older fairly large and reasonably cheap place then eventually fixing it up. I found this one tonight, 2 bedrooms (one for gear storage), 2 bathrooms (one for a film developing darkroom) a small kithen, 69 square meters. Heck I might even be able to set up a small white background studio. The cost of this place is around $55000, plus lawyer, deed transfer fees etc. so probably somewhere under $60000. The advantage of buying older condos is that you can get them fixed up to look really good at a reasonable cost as renovating in Thai is much cheaper than here in Canada. I could go with something around $60000 or even something cheaper, there are smaller 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom options for around $30000-$35000. Here is the quite nice $60000 place: