I had my doubts about moving into the house that I now call home. It is by far the oldest dwelling I have ever rented and was built in the days when Taiwanese where not particularly discerning about how they built their houses. Functionality overruled aesthetics back then, it seems. Starting on the first floor: when we first saw the house the front door-wall consisted of three segments of a rolling garage type door that opened into the living room. I insisted that if I was going to rent the place a real front door would have to be installed so that if I wanted to open and close my front door, I wouldn't have to roll it up and down every time. This was done, with very pleasing results.
The living room, as small as it is, takes up one half of the first floor. The stairwell, leading to the second and third floors, takes up the third quarter of the first floor. Tucked underneath the stairs is a bathroom. The odd thing about the bathroom is that previously it opened onto the kitchen, which took up the last quarter of the first floor. I asked that a kitchen area be built in the small open area behind the house, which was done using corrugated iron, and now the bathroom opens onto my home classroom and on hot days you just leave a chicken on one of the kitchen counters for it to be slow roasted. The old kitchen taps remained in my classroom for a few days, but those have now been removed, although the water pipes still remain to memorialize my classroom's former occupation.
The second floor has a bedroom directly above the living room. Built into the bedroom, as opposed to next to it, is what could possibly called an in-suite rather than en-suite bathroom. The walls of the bathroom do not extend all the way to the ceiling, for some inexplicable reason, giving one a sense of taking a shower in your bedroom. The room on the second floor directly above my classroom is my study, where I am writing this. I think it is by far the best room in the house, because there is a big window in the back wall that looks out onto a power facility. What that means is that there are no houses directly behind me. The nearest houses that I can see are about two hundred metres away, which means that I have something of a "view", albeit a power facility, and have lots of light and a cool breeze coming into this room. By Taiwanese standards this is an extraordinary luxury!
The third floor has another bedroom, without the bathroom, directly above the second floor bedroom. It is spacious and I have made it the master bedroom. Outside the bedroom, built onto the stairwell landing is a toilet (by the way, the other two bathrooms also have toilets in them, a typical Taiwanese design). Like the second floor bathroom, the walls of the toilet don't extend all the way to the ceiling, so a determined fart on the third floor could conceivably wend its way to the first floor! The back quarter of the third floor is a large balcony where I have put my washing machine and clothes lines.
Despite my new home's undoubted quirkiness, I must admit that it has grown on me over the past two weeks that I have been here. That may be partly due to all the new things Pei Han and I have bought, from a bed and air-conditioners to a new sofa and a paper cup holder, to make our home more comfortable, or it may be due to Pei Han's offer of food and burning ghost money to the gods to bless and protect our house. Whichever the case, we seem to have reached a balance between the quaint and the quirky.
Dion Marc Delport
17 June 2007