Apartment in Hong Kong

Apartment hunting in Hong Kong was, in one word, discouraging. We knew we would have to take a smaller place, but seeing the reality of it was disheartening.

The population of Hong Kong is greater than 7 million, with a land area of about 425 square miles. To put that into perspective Utah is almost 82,000 square miles with under 2.8 million people. Hong Kong Island, the part of HK where we live, is 30 square miles and has a population of over 1.3 million. West Valley City, Utah has a land area of 35 square miles and 120,000 people. One building (ICC) in Hong Kong can house 30,000.

This is what some of the apartment buildings in Hong Kong look like:

Well, those are a couple nice ones. Here's another:
Understandably, most apartments are small (and extremely expensive) with little to no storage space. A lot of the apartments we looked at literally had no closets. The entire time we kept wondering how people live in such places. They must not own "things." Then we went to an apartment where the tenant hadn't moved out yet. She had stuff stacked from floor to ceiling in every room, some of it on shelves, and some not. I really wish I would have taken pictures, but you can get an idea of what I'm talking about from the pictures below:


The girl's apartment we looked at was bigger and nicer than these, but just as crowded. I guess that is how people live in such small spaces. You can see more pictures here. I think we Americans are spoiled with space; we like to have everything put away--no clutter. We are coming to find out that is hard to do in HK.

After looking at about 20 apartments, we finally settled for one that was still above the company's budget (luckily they agreed to increase it). The apartment we chose has a small amount of storage space, bigger (I didn't say big, I said bigGER) rooms than most of the others, an oven, and is furnished (the furniture in Taiwan belonged to the landlord); in short: more potential to make tight quarters work for our little family. Would you believe out of about 10 apartment buildings only 1 had apartments with ovens and none had dishwashers?!!

We live on the 32nd floor of the building on the right. There are 36 floors in our building.

Now I present to you the beauty within (sense the sarcasm). Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and much, much smaller than it sounds.

I will say I do love the kitchen. It is actually bigger than any I've had and the stove/oven is better than the one I had in Taiwan.
The living room; don't worry, we had them take the classy blue couch away. And yes that is my "active" two-year old climbing IN the furniture.
Love the view out the living room window.
Mismatched furniture in the DINING AREA(!), but hey, it's storage, so I'm not complaining. I know, I know, the curtains are amazing too.
One of the [small] bedrooms.
The master bedroom and bathroom. Aren't they luxurious?

Our view.
Movers started bringing our stuff Friday afternoon. Then it kept coming, and coming, and coming, and didn't stop until all 144 boxes were in. At about box 60 or 70 all the closets and cupboards in the apartment were full. The movers were supposed unpack each box and put the stuff away, but we had to tell them to leave it and 'stack 'em up' because there was no place to put anything!
I think I caught Cody and a mover at a moment when yet another garment box was brought into the room. Can't you just see it in their expressions, "Where is all this supposed to go?!"
There's a mover in there somewhere, trying to put Jade's bed together. Nice working space, eh?
Believe it or not, we did dejunk before we moved over, anticipating the smaller place. Friday night we worked for awhile, then gave up and slept in the hotel that night. There was no where to put the boxes that were on our beds, because the floor space was already all taken! Case in point:
When we finally decided to tackle the big project again on Saturday, unpacking went something like this: "this goes in the donation pile; this goes in the garbage." Once we saw the apartment was way over full, we were much more ready to be rid of anything we didn't absolutely need. At one point, in his exasperation, I think Cody said, "Just because we live in Asia doesn't mean we have to throw our lives away!"

My brain has felt frazzled all week as I've had so much on my mind, so many things to do. I woke up about 5:40 a.m. Saturday morning and couldn't fall back to sleep. My mind was racing trying to come up with solutions of how to fit and organize all our stuff. I was anxious to get it worked out! Now it is Thursday, and we are still living in the midst of boxes and working on storage solutions. But I'm finally not feeling so overwhelmed by it all. And I think it's going to work.

Although all this will take some time (and **choke** money) to get worked out, I still don't feel like I have much to complain about. I just take a look out our window and think, "Hey, we could be living in one of those places."
Here's a close up.
I can't help but feel that we are sooo blessed and have gratitude that we do indeed have *stuff* and such a nice place to put it in.