When Chen Yen Lung and his wife, Wang Le Jia, moved into their two-bedroom apartment in an upmarket Beijing district, they were confronted with a scene familiar to new home owners in China. The walls were unpainted, the concrete floors lay bare, pipes and wiring had been left exposed, and there were no amenities such as air conditioning or gas.
The middle-aged couple had paid 800,000 yuan (£70,000) for the fourth-floor apartment but by the time they finished putting it in order they had parted with another 200,000 yuan (£17,500) for renovations.
"There was nothing here when we arrived eight months ago, just the space, and it was in a very rough condition," said Mr Chen, waving his arm around the 114square-metre apartment. Since then they have painted the walls, laid glazed red tiles on the floor, and added furniture, including leather armchairs, a marble-topped coffee table, wooden bookshelves and several large potted plants. They have also installed air-conditioning and a security door, and built a frosted-glass partition in the oversized hallway to create a studio for Mr Chen, who is an artist specialising in delicate water colours.
The result is a pleasant living space, clean and cool, in comparison to the dowdy state-owned apartments which are typical of Beijing.
The Chens are taking part in the latest revolution in this vast country where millions of city dwellers are buying homes for the first time. The government is promoting home ownership after 50 years of allocating low-rent homes through work units. People are being pushed to buy their existing flat or a new highrise apartment, or, if really rich, a villa in an English-style suburb.
The idea has many merits, chief of which is that it creates jobs in construction, banking, insurance, roads, services and home furnishings, and not the least of which is that it provides an escape from interfering inlaws and shared kitchens and toilets.
Hoardings at building sites are plastered with advertisements for removal companies and home decorators and Shanghai even has a Swedish Ikea home furnishings store. The reform means that people can now change jobs without worrying about losing housing benefits, and anyone with money can live where they choose - from young entrepreneurs to a laid-off worker with savings, to a waitress I know of in a Beijing bar for foreigners who arrived penniless in the city three years ago and has made enough money to buy a small place of her own.
To stimulate home ownership, and to get people to spend their savings and keep the economy growing, Premier Zhu Rongji decreed in March that work units stop allocating houses or flats from the middle of this year and that the rents of government apartments should be increased steeply to provide an incentive to home ownership.
Before June there was a scramble by people to get married and be assigned a work-unit flat before the deadline, and many officials are said to have taken the opportunity to acquire better government apartments to buy and then sell on for a big profit.
The reform is working, though it is patchy in places. The high cost of new homes, aggravated by steep land prices and a multitude of fees and taxes, has discouraged buyers, and many new apartment blocks are almost empty.
"Also the regulations for getting loans are very strict," Mr Chen said. "And you need a guarantee that you can make the repayments. Flats like ours are out of most people's reach. A couple in the middle-income level will earn just 300,000 yuan in their whole life.
"But Chinese people living in apartments like mine are the beginning of a new phenomenon," he added as we sipped tea from blue-patterned bowls in his living room.
It is a phenomenon which spells the decline of the traditional courtyard life of old Beijing, where families lived together in compounds hidden in a maze of laneways known as hutongs. The Chens lived in a fine courtyard in the city centre - his father was the famous Chinese artist, Chen Banding - but had to sell it and split the money as there were too many family members to share it.
"I miss the courtyard life very much," Wang Le Jia said. "At the same time living in the courtyard was inconvenient. There were problems of heating in winter and no toilets."
Chen also misses the courtyard atmosphere and is only slowly getting used to being the owner of a private flat. So far they have no gas because only 40 per cent of his building is occupied and the gas company will not come until it rises to 70 per cent. No telephone has been installed, despite repeated promises. Also the service charge of 1,000 yuan (£80) a month, for hot water, security and maintenance, is a heavy burden.
"But I'm adjusting gradually," he said. "The environment is less polluted, I don't feel so overcrowded and the facilities are better." He likes the higher standard of living which home ownership brings. "The thing is," said Mr Chen, as he showed me around his apartment, "people are going to take more care of their own houses than the work units ever did."