Breakthrough!

Dropped in at the office of an neighbour I had heard of - they had some temporary extra space, that could fit the two of us. Yippee, what fluke!

Just a day back, we had found a regular commercial office space in HSR layout. Large 2 rooms for 20K; asked the owner if he can give us only 1 room; he didn't seem very keen. Today he agreed. We are using up our quota of luck this year!

Decided to go ahead with Koramangala space sharing option, even though it was temporary, it was more accessible to people from the rest of the city.

Rental Race

Some landlords seemed either sceptical or worried when we said we were going to publish news; so we just said we were going to develop a internet website; that satisfied them; but it also convinced them we could afford high rentals. Mention our requirements, and brokers would say, "what madam, lot of computer companies, they all pay...."
How do average citizens like school teachers or government employees afford these atrocious rentals...(good subject for an article)

CDP Rules!

Checked out the CDP plan. (For what is CDP, read here). Ah, we have further constraints!
So now we have to look for a semi residential or commercial area; or a residential area, with the house on a road wider than xx metres, and the rental space less than % of the house or 500 sq ft whichever was less.
In semi residential areas, the landlords were ok with non-commercial power tariffs as long as we didn't have a name board.
Anyway we have started checking out commercial office spaces, extremely unaffordable. Spreading the word around to see if any small IT firms could share a couple of cubicles with us (at a rate we could afford), no luck yet.

Looking for an office

Working out of home is good because you don't have to go to an office. The keyword is "go" - it is ok to work in an office, but getting there is no fun for us Bangaloreans. But it got to a point when we needed to have a lot of conversations between us and with others, so we really needed an office.Our requirements was simple, a largish room that could accomodate upto 4-5 of us, plus a small meeting room sort of place. I was particular about ventilation and natural light. Working all day with a tubelight makes me cranky. Ideally, the window should look out into some greenery. (I was spolit by many years at Infosys where I always managed to get a corner near a window and looked out at the heavenly gardens/trees.
We had a budget that could meet the rent of a single bedroom house/apartment. We started office hunting in areas from JP Nagar to HSR Layout and upto Adugodi so at the least the two of us didn't have to travel too much. But it looked like there are very few single bed room apts, owners try to add a cubby hole size room, term it a 2nd bedroom and expect 12K. Quite a few houses had rooms without any windows, let alone windows with a view.
Deep in my heart, I do believe it is actually possible to build in small spaces yet provide good ventilation/lighting, though I have never seen such a house!