Home renovation tips - change address

This will be the first of the series of tips for home renovation based on my experience of renovating my house in Malaysia. As such, the tips will be most relevant to renovating homes in Malaysia, but many will be relevant in renovating for anywhere in the world.

This house renovation tip is not applicable to minor renovations where you continue to stay in the house, but for major renovations where you need to shift to a temporary adobe. This first tip relates to snail mail - letters, especially letters from banks and other financial institutions aw well as other important letters. Now when renovating, I do not believe you will constantly be at the site plus there will be many non family members. You would not want to risk the possibilities of them intercepting your sensitive mails and registered letters etc. will you?

A cheap solution would be to change the address of financial institutions and other sensitive sources of your mails to your temporary home or trusted relatives. However, this will involve you going to many places, but if you don't mind, I supposed it is OK.

May I suggest an easy and not expensive solution - get a post box (peti surat) from the Post Office and instruct the Post Office to sent all mail addressed to the site to the post box. Then you don't have the hassle of going to multiple places to change address.

I did that in a Selangor Post Office. The process is not instantaneous. You will have to apply, the application will be sent to the Selangor Central Post Office which is in Shah Alam. If approved, they will then send an invoice to the Post Office where you applied. I do not know if they will inform you when the invoice arrive, but you will then have to pay the RM50 for the annual fee plus a refundable RM30 as deposit for the key. You will then have to wait for the person in charge to change the lock (I am not 100% sure if they actually do) before you get your key.

I could not wait, so what I did was to go the the Shah Alam Post Office with my application and I got the invoice on the same day. Even after returning to the local post office and paying on the spot, I could not get the key because the person in charge of changing the lock was not around and I had to return the next day.

Location map of Shah Alam Post Office (Selangor Central Post Office)

View Shah Alam Post Office in a larger map