You're in amongst the archives.
Archive Category: Real Estate
- M finds house on internet and gets his sister to inspect it. The news is good.
- B makes offer on house that night.
- Next morning: offer accepted.
- All trundles along, deal is about to go through.
- Bank calls B and informs her that the property has been valued. At $40k under the asking price.
- As bank will only lend 90% of the valued amount….
- Deal falls through. B organises a second valuation, this time through a company with a clue.
- It can’t be done quick enough. Someone else buys the house.
- B’s stress rash disappears as all is resolved. She informs her boss that she may not be leaving at the end of the month.
- M discovers a new term: gazumping. B & M decide to go ahead with second valuation and gazump if it comes through at a decent price.
- B calls agent with intent to scope out gazumpability. Agent says he’s been trying to make contact. House is back on the market, the deal with the buyers has fallen through.
- B and M dance gleefully. The new valuation comes in $23.5k over the last one. It’s good, but not good enough.
- Sadness reigns.
- B’s father steps in to cover the shortfall, as B prostrates herself promising to take out a personal loan to pay him back after settlement date.
- The useless Queensland solicitors don’t know what an Express Post envelope is and it takes a week for the contracts to make it to Melbourne.
- This wouldn’t matter, but it means that there is only four days for the bank to get the finance sorted, which in ordinary circumstances would be fine…but….
- With the finance approval needed by Friday, the bank calls on Tuesday and
blithely informs B that because the house needs fixing up they are going to deduct the amount it’s going to take to fix it up from the loan.
‘How much will that be?’
‘You’ll need at least another ten grand and we need a building inspection and quotes for all the work that the building inspector recommends needs to be done.’
‘!@#$@%#%^~!’
‘And,’ the bank continues, unmoved, ‘you will need to get all the work done, the tradespeople will then invoice you, you will pass the invoices to us and we will pay the tradespeople.’
‘But…we were going to do all the work on the house. Can’t I quote on how much it will cost me to do the work?’
‘No.’
‘So whoever I get the quotes from (over the next ten hours) has to do the work?’
‘Yes.’ - B falls in heap and cannot be revived. M puts on superhero cape and launches himself into the stratosphere while B curls into a ball railing against fascist lending institutions.
- M gets a sympathetic building inspector, an awesome electrician and lots of useful information from the council. Then he masquerades as a Hervey Bay based handyman and quotes on doing all the work so we can get money back on all the labour costs.
- Meanwhile, B embarks on the most difficult part of the campaign: convincing her mother to sign a statutory declaration that she will ‘give’ B $5000 as a non-repayable gift. (B initially tries for $10k but was swiftly rebuffed). B prostrates herself once again and explains in as many different languages as she can master that she doesn’t actually need the cash as such, just the statutory declaration. She explains seventeen more times that she can come up with the money herself, all she needs is the statutory declaration. B’s mother plays with her like a cat does with a mouse. B keeps stout composure as she drags her mother to the police station, where a statutory declaration is signed and sorted. B’s mother says once again;
‘If you don’t have the money yourself to buy the house, you shouldn’t be buying it.’
B grits teeth, but can’t help mentioning that the fact that the government is doling out $7000 grants to first home owners is something of an incentive. B’s mother leaves. B resumes foetal position, clutching cherished bit of paper. - The next morning (Thursday - the day before B has to give up house or lose deposit and also, incidentally, the last day of her 29th year) B goes to bank and throws all documents, plus a thoughtfully worded begging letter, at the long suffering Victoria. B feels instant relief - there is nothing more that can be done.
- Wrong.
- Friday morning, Victoria calls. The loan can only be ‘conditionally approved’ as B (with the best of intentions) has written in her begging letter of her plan to pull down the hugely unsightly carport.
‘Oh no,’ says the bank. ‘This will detract from the value of the property - you must get the property revalued minus the value of the carport.’
B thinks quickly, and suggests that she probably won’t pull down the carport anymore.
‘Too late!’ cries the bank. ‘Go and get it revalued!’ - With four hours to go, B chews off her own arm and calls the valuers. The valuers are at an all day conference and cannot be contacted. She convinces the person who answers the phone to giver her the mobile number of the valuer who is at the conference, and also to look up the file and find out exactly how much the carport is worth. It comes to a huge $1659 (it is impossible to fathom where the $9 comes from, but B is beyond any attempt at fathoming). B calls Victoria and says she can cover the $1659.
‘That’s nice,’ says Victoria, ‘but the lending department want the valuer to look at the building report and then deliver a quote in writing as to whether knocking down the carport will decrease the overall valuation.’
B shrieks; ‘This is IMPOSSIBLE and I will lose my deposit if you don’t approve this loan in the next two hours!’ - Victoria = Sympathetic / Lending Department = Unmoved
- B consults the heavens, and her father, and decides to trust in the gods. She will continue on with the deal, thus risking the deposit on the assumption that the house cannot drop in value more than the famous $1659. She tells Victoria. Victoria says OK.
- It is a hollow victory.
- Suddenly, B gets phone call from lender who is calling on her mobile from the valuation conference. She tells B that she got the message but was unable to understand it due to B’s extremely agitated delivery. B breathes deeply. B tells the valuer of plight. The valuer (the most extraordinary of women) snorts derisively.
‘Who’s your lender?’
‘Resi,’ squeaks B.
‘Completely pedantic,’ snaps Wonder Woman. ‘Give me their phone number and a contact name.’ - B gets call from Victoria.
‘The valuer has called and said that she won’t be changing the valuation of the property if the carport is removed - all is well. Your loan is approved!!!’ - B passes out. B is awakened by the phone. It’s Victoria who instructs her to go and have several drinks. B acquiesces. As B is about to hang up, Victoria enquires as to whether B has contacted the solicitors to tell them to go ahead with the deal? B’s life flashes before her eyes. She hangs up on Victoria and stabs the solicitors number into the phone. As she does this, she checks her email and finds an email from said solicitor who wants to know whether the deal is going ahead.
- B makes contact with solicitor and instructs ‘ALL SYSTEMS ARE GO!’
- B collapses only one more time before heading off to her thirtieth birthday party, where she drinks in moderation, with the knowledge that if she does not, she will wipe herself out until Settlement Day.
- The End (so far).
No House For Me
Monday, 25 November 2002
My house that I was willing to saw off my own arm to have has been sold to someone who will never love it as much as I do :o( This is very sad.
Everything Sucks
Wednesday, 2 April 2003
Everything has gone wrong. The house was valued under the price that it was sold for. Apparently the valuers in the area judge properties on past sale prices which means they don’t take into account the rise in prices over the past twelve months or so. They said that the kitchen and bathroom needed rennovating and the house needed painting inside and out, and priced that at $25k. They don’t care that I bought it to do up - they even took another $2000 off for polishing the floorboards.
I have organised another valuation through a different company and have my fingers crossed - it’s all I can do. I have to wait for two weeks to find out if they will value it any higher. The word gobsmacked might describe my feelings, but it doesn’t really convey my angst. I could mention the word jinx…but I won’t. Oh.
!@#$%!!!
Thursday, 3 April 2003
My horoscope says:
Mo Mo Mope
Monday, 7 April 2003
So paint me grey and call me Eeyore. Someone just bought my house. Not only that, they actually have all the cash themselves and so don’t need to have diverting times with whacked out valuers. I am trying to assume that this is for the best and that an even better place will come along. Yeah right. Magic happens. Blah. Why would someone with $110k in cash want to buy a dump to do up? My woe is great. I look woebegone. I have never actually managed to use that word in a sentence, but I think the time is ripe for woebegone. My horoscope keeps telling me that this is all for the best - but I swear if something good doesn’t happen soon I am going to hunt down Jonathan Cainer and do his aura some serious damage. Looks like I’ll be in Melbourne for a while longer.
Mirror Mirror
Monday, 21 April 2003
I bought a mirror on the weekend at a garage sale….this time with my lunch money *sigh*. The mirror apparently began the day priced at about $50 but by the time I got there they basically threw it at me for $15. It’s (I’m guessing) sort of art deco looking - very pretty. Here ’tis;
Naturally I had it in mind for the (touch wood) new house because it won’t fit in the terrace/caravan. I am being driven insane by the knowledge that had the solicitors in Queensland put down their cans of FourX and pulled their fingers out of their arses, everything might have been sorted by now. But no, although I specifically requested that they send down the certified contracts of sale via Express Post (which means it would have got here last Tuesday) they were unable to wrap their brains around that…it still hasn’t arrived. It makes me want to KILL!
More
Wednesday, 30 April 2003
I got more yellow flowers today from another (almost) equally unexpected source! The lovely Heidi bought me an early birthday/cheer up present. Two bunches of yellow gerberas!! They’re lovely…I am feeling somewhat improved and generally fatalistic.
I have been told by bank that selling my shares is acceptable, so that is one good thing. I feel like I am swinging on a precipice…when actually that’s just rather over-dramatic. I’ve done almost everything I could possibly do, and now I just have to hold on hope!
I Want To Believe
Thursday, 1 May 2003
Taurus (-you poor blighted creature)
How can you have a phoenix without first creating ashes for it to rise up from? How can you make a silk purse if you don’t have a sow’s ear? From where would you ever get a silver lining if you do not have a cloud? When will it ever be possible to head for the other side of the street, unless the other sidewalk happens to be shrouded in shadow? Now I know what you are thinking. “He is labouring the point.” But I don’t care. It is the only point that needs to be made. The New Moon in your sign could not have a clearer message. From something bad, something good is about to emerge.
[B taps foot impatiently, looking skyward]
Oh YEAH!
Friday, 2 May 2003
I have some serious glee going on!! After almost falling through on Tuesday and then again this morning, THE HOUSE IS MINE!!!!! I don’t know what else could possibly go wrong now, but if it does, there’s no way that I can wriggle out without losing a lot of money. I am going to write up the whole saga (which will read like a bloody Bruce Willis action flick) and post a link to it here so the world at large can be privy to my last few weeks. The whole process has been more stressful than anything that I have encountered in my entire (get this) thirty years. First I lost it due to a dodgy valuation and someone else snapped it up and bought it, then that fell through, a new valuation was done, money was sourced from long suffering parents….oh god. I can’t even be bothered writing about it. I need a drink.
[B collapses to the ground in exaustion, and can only be revived by a well aimed gin and tonic.]
Brief Overview
Monday, 5 May 2003
What follows is a short and succinct (well…it does have dot points) description of ‘My Life in House-Buying Hell’. I have posted it here as I wish to have it available for reference if I am ever so stupid as to even dwell on buying another house….
Too Stressed to Blog
Monday, 12 May 2003
My real estate experience drags inexorably onwards…now the owner won’t clear the rubbish from the yard, though she signed the contract saying she would. It doesn’t look like the documents are going to be ready by Friday (settlement day) which means if the owner doesn’t grant an extension I lose my deposit. Though if she doesn’t removed the rubbish, she’s voided the contract. Hopefully I can say something like ‘I’ll deal with the rubbish, if you grant me a weeks extension….’ Who knows. This is the woman who wouldn’t give an extension of three days when I wanted to get the house revalued and then someone else bought it!!
I had to get my dad to buy me a shot of Johnny Walker Black Label at 10am this morning…to bolster my (sorely frayed) coping mechanisms.
Thank god Marie sent me this link. I needed it big time.
A Poem
Wednesday, 14 May 2003
In the trickle, ebb and flow
There is only one thing I know
To buy a house is very bad
To buy a house can drive you mad
Stuff that can go pear shaped will
Leaving you faint and feeling ill
Deposit hanging by a thread,
They’ll grind your bones to make their bread
Everything down to the wire,
My head is like a tumble dryer
Moving at a glacial pace
Then scrambling fear in undue haste
A faxing here, a faxing there
Pretending that you really care
The only good thing I can equate?
From all this crap, I’ve lost some weight.
(It still drags on - sentiment same as previous post - too stressed to blog - though some therapeutic rhyming seems to have seeped through my fingertips.)
Clearing From Clouds
Friday, 16 May 2003
Just sent off my report on the use of probability in weather forecasting. The relief is large. Of course it’s probably going to received with incredulity and derision, but at this point I don’t care. The latest real estate addition to the saga known as the-most-difficult-house-buying-process-this-galaxy-has-ever-witnessed is that the mortgage papers got lost in the mail. Which meant I had to be given faxed copies to get signed and back to them (so that the ‘four clear days’ required by evil lenders could be taken from that date) and then I had to get the originals to them before settlement. All this I have done, much to the amusement of the solicitor over at LegalAid Victoria who had to sign all my mortgage documents twice and got to hear the saga from me, in ever-advancing stages of panic.
I left a message this morning with the evil lenders nice legal assistant in Sydney saying;
‘Please tell me if everything is OK, I don’t think I can get another extension on top of the extension we’ve already got. Is this all going to be OK?’
She obviously thought something had gone drastically wrong (no…that was just everything up until now) and rang back to say;
‘Everything’s fine - is there a problem at your end?’
And I had to seriously think about it, and was hugely relieved to be able to say;
‘No, my only problem is that I want you to tell me that everything is going to be fine for settlement day. Fine. F-I-N-E.’
I imagined her knuckles whitening as she gripped the telephone, but couldn’t tell a thing from her voice. She actually sounded very sympathetic…which makes me tend to believe that she doesn’t deal with freaks like me all the time. The instructions on the mortgage papers gave specific instructions that all liasing with her (acting for the lender) must be done through my solicitor. But that only stands when everything is not the shape of a pear.
‘It’s all on track, everything is going to plan, you don’t need to worry.’
Ah. The balm of those words. You Don’t Need To Worry.
I went boneless chicken (see The Goodies-episode #16 - see Hippo - I told you I’d find out) and had to have two cups of tea (I really should keep something slightly stronger in the office).
Hello?
Wednesday, 21 May 2003
“Any news?”
“Nooo. Haven’t heard anything.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
A pause.
“She said if there were any dramas that she would call before 3pm…and I suppose you knew that because you just called me a two minutes past three?”
“Well…um, yeah.”
“Well I haven’t heard anything and I feel weird about not having heard anything, even though I should be standing on my desk and screaming ONLY SEVENTEEN MORE WORKING DAYS IN THIS SOUL DESTROYING TERTIARY CONCRETE BOX but instead I’m sitting here. Blogging. Making typing mistakes as my eyes have their own tennis match between the clock and the phone.”
(I didn’t actually say that last bit verbatim, but I communicated it as well as I could in an office where the only sound was my voice, the clicking of two other people’s mice and the f!@#ing air vent.)
It’s 3:35pm and it seems to me that I probably have my house all settled up and accounted for. But really, the truth is that I need someone to smack me over the head and call me from Hervey Bay (interesting logistics) and scream “It’s ALRIGHT!! Everything is SORTED!! You don’t have to worry about ANYTHING except moving about a thousand miles away, taking out a personal loan to repay your father and making both cats fit in the same box without losing an arm!! CONGRATULATIONS!!!”
Can you tell I’m beginning to panic?
The Smurf Song
Thursday, 22 May 2003
How weird!! I am a home owner!? Bizarre! Didn’t feel like it had happened until five minutes ago when I called up my solicitor and she said it had all happened yesterday without a problem. Oh. My. God. Tra la. Tra la. Why do I feel like sucking a whole lot of helium and singing the theme to ‘The Smurfs’?!! This is wrong. I really do need a cup of tea, a Bex and a nice lie down!
Thank you to all my friends for putting up with me over the past two months, the whole process could be turned into an opera and it would translate perfectly. Moving is not going to seem that difficult compared to the dramas that have already happened. HUZZAH! Goodbye Melbourne winter!
/–more coherent thoughts to follow–/
The Means of Escape
Friday, 30 May 2003
Having just endured a typical phone call from my mother, seeing this finally appear has made me very happy.
Part II
Wednesday, 25 June 2003
I am so out of the loop and very unused to spending such long amounts of time away from my computer! I’m missing my fast-as-lightning work connection already! When we got up the morning after we had arrived, Queensland had decided to impress us with it’s weather. It was so balmy - even in the early morning. Coming from Melbourne I expect the horrible frosty chill when venturing outside and I didn’t get it - it was sunny and about 22 degrees celcius. Very nice. We went to the aqaurium that M’s sister (J) and brother in law (R) run and we drank coffee on their deck that looks out over the sand to Fraser Island.
After a while I couldn’t sit still and be polite anymore as I wanted to grab the keys and go and look at my house! Well, I did and I didn’t. Anyway, we set off (putting on the GPS to see exactly how far away from town we were going to be) and ten minutes later we were at the top of our new street; this is what I saw…
Not Dead, Just Painting
Monday, 21 July 2003
I can carbon-date myself by paint colour. My days lately have unfolded thusly:
- Spend several minutes devising ultimate torturous demise for above mentioned ornithological abberration.
- Prise oneself out of bed and dream of the sound of a hot shower
- Modify the dream to that of an actual bathroom
- Dress in three million year old paint encrusted things that began their lives as my favourite cords, and a flannel shirt courtesy of Pialba Op-Shop
- Get handed tea by diplomatic M
- Perform morning ritual of surveying all we command (i.e the 1.25 acres)
- Say hello to cats in their cat-home, drown in guilt for approx. 12 minutes
- Forget to wash mug and leave it in the place I’m least likely to find it in two hours time
- Attempt to begin painting for the day
- Immediately discover several places I haven’t sanded well enough
- Swear. Sand them. Brush dust away. Vacuumn dust away. Blow dust away
- Dust in eye. Ow.
- Finally apply paint to wall
- Colour is WRONG. Is it me? Is it the wall? Stare at wall from several different angles for far longer than necessary
- Compare paint colour with paint sample pot. Wildly different.
- Get in van for the millionth time, drive to paint shop
- Get new improved paint
- Drive home
- Repeat the five prior dot points at least five times over the next six days
- Endeavour to go hard and do night painting. Thousands of tiny black flying bugs come to cheer me on. I stop.
- Make more tea.
Not Dead, Still Painting
Wednesday, 10 September 2003
Am smelling of turpentine and covered in bites. Returned almost a week ago and now feel as if Melbourne was some kind of dream I had (whilst sleeping in a fridge). M was jubilant to have me back *grin* - he got v.lonely without me, surrounded by people who think The Simpsons suck and that a meal without meat isn’t a meal. We had a lovely cinematic reunion on the station platform. We are still not in residence yet, but it won’t be long. I am so sick of living out of a suitcase, I don’t care if I have to wee in a bucket for the next fortnight. The house looks (besides the skirting board issue) absolutely transformed. Polished floorboards throughout, two bedrooms painted and a divine little deck with steps outside the back door. All that work, all on his ownsome, no wonder M was starting to get slightly wild-eyed (not to mention wild-haired).
Showers
Saturday, 18 October 2003
Well, we’ve been able to flush for about a week now - and last nights achievement even eclipsed the wonders of that! The shower that M has been working so hard on is wet, responsive and…. operational! (And only cold at this point, but still!!) All these blokes who know everything kept looking at us oddly when we would tell them that M was making the shower out of wood, fibreglass and epoxy - it seems that up in Hervey Bay it’s Lamipanel, a pre-molded cubicle or nothing. I got similarly weird looks when I kept explaining that a tile would only find entry to our bathroom over my dead, still warm body. Tiles suck. I don’t care about the invention of grout pens, they just suck.
So our shower is huge, wooden, and when it’s totally finished I am going to be shameless and post a picture of it here. Last night was a grand night out at (get this) M’s mothers, next door neighbours, daughters house-warming. She lives two houses away from us - the average age level was hovering around the 70-year point and I felt quite odd. I became more and more desperate to run from the house as conversations continued around me and I became encreasingly aware that I had barely any fingernails left to chew off and that my fave show had started five minutes previously *sigh*. M consoled himself with liberal doses of rum (supplied by the excellent neighbours who gave us the freezer) until me kicking him the leg (i.e begging to excape) finally had the desired effect.
We are very short on people like ourselves up here and find ourselves toning down our our more quirky ideas and biting our tongues when people opinionate at us. It’s all to do with different cultures and different age-groups. Put it this way - I was totally gobsmacked to walk into a cafe today and find Aimee Mann playing.
A Year in the Sub-tropics
Saturday, 22 May 2004
So it’s a year to the day since settlement on the house. It’s passed so fast that Michael Schumacher would have had trouble keeping up with it. I can remember how hideous the house buying process was - made a million times worse by the fact that I was in Victoria trying to negotiate on a Queensland property. Well. The house is nearly there - 300% better than we found it - and it’s exciting to think that as of today we can sell (even though we don’t know how - do you have to tell the bank?) and head back down to Melbourne. Hopefully that should happen sometime before September, but we shall see.
I can’t believe I’ve survived a year! We are still cooking on our camp stove with one gas ring (as the hundred or so dollars needed to hook up our cooktop has always been needed more elsewhere), we have only just this week discovered fishing at the end of our street and we still loathe the ShutUpAndStopIts next door. When we’ve signed the contracts to sell I’m going to scream at them to SHUT THE F!@#ING GATE every morning without fail. I miss our friends, I miss the band, I miss cool pubs and cafes with crappy couchs and people who don’t think Coopers is a weird beer. Poor M probably misses all that stuff more than me - he hasn’t been back to Melbourne since we left!
Things I Have Learnt:
- Everyone here has either a four wheel drive, a big and irredeemably stupid dog or both
- If the owner of the said 4WD is male, then seven times out of ten they will have the physique of a steamed dim sim
- The steamed dim sims, eight times out of ten (if they’re below 50) will inevitably possess a white-trash too-long goatee, short hair tricked up with the occasional mullet
- People are friendlier here
- People here are incapable of saying ‘I don’t know’. For example: “Where would be the best place to buy gumboots?” Even though they have absolutely no idea and have never even touched on the vague cosmic qualities of this question, they will instantly say “Awww mate, what you need to do is go down to the place on the corner of such and such street. They’ll help you out.” This is a lie. But they sound so knowing. It took us about seven months to figure out that any local that sounds like they know what they’re talking about probably knows less than we do
- FourX tastes like wee. The wee of someone who drinks a lot of water. No state can become the ‘Smart State’ when their beer is closer to urine than hops.
- I have been able to string out ‘working from home’ and score an overseas trip…I definitely owe my boss some blood money and have promised to return to work in Melbourne once the house is sold
- M and I are good work partners; after inital struggles with funds we have sorted out the crap and discovered that it’s nice to have a project that we’re both investing a lot of work in
- Having space is exciting, but an acre is barely enough. In the house adjoining ours in Melbourne I could hear our neighbour clear his throat every morning. Here, I can hear the guy over the road clear his throat, and every dog for miles
OK. I got carried away. It’s been a year of wild, exciting DIY poverty stricken adventure. We lived the past week on $50. The phone bill is due, as is the house insurance, car rego and RACV renewal - it’s an ongoing juggling act - but it’s provided a waaaaay more exciting life for the past year, and has ensured that we’ll have the funds (touch wood) to actually have some choices as to what we do next.
And there endeth the monologue. Tomorrow I’ll be back to talking about mudcrabs and the new ‘friends’ that are making moving south more and more attractive.
Emerald Isle
Saturday, 12 June 2004
Today Ellise and I went to look at her block of land in Emerald. I was a little bit worried that looking at someone elses land would kind of be like looking at their new baby. I would be compelled to coo about how beautiful it was, even though it was indistinguishable from any other baby/block of land. My worries were unfounded. It really is a beautiful 3/4 acre block, with lots of trees that are too big to wrap your arms around, huge ferns, a little river, a dead old tractor and a lovely view. Not only that, but it’s not more than five minutes or so from a few cool cafes. I’m going to have a chat to M about this ;o)
One Year Later
Tuesday, 22 June 2004
M and I are having a low-key celebration, dancing to the tune of the ShutUpAndStopIts from next door. We’ve got a bottle of red (paying $5 above the usual limit does wonders) a bottle of white (very nice white) some Bass Strait Blue cheese and some Chocolat Noir Orange. Tasty. I’ve just used the majority of the white in my mushroom risotto. I am culinarily (!?) inspired because I purchased my first ever cookbook whilst I was in Melbourne (never let it be said that the Myer Stocktake Sale is good for nothing). Bowl Food. Everything in this book can be served in a ONE bowl. I love it. Except for the fact that no matter how organised I try to be, I never have 100% of the correct ingredients. So tonight I substituted onion for leek and basmati for aborio (nice try) and hoped for the best. M seemed to think it was bordering on sublime, but that could’ve been the wine.
Oh. Why the celebration? It was exactly a year ago today that we:
a) saw our house for the first time in real life
b) spent the day clearing old mattresses, stoves and other scary detritus
c) realised what we’d got ourselves into…
I can tell we were in shock by the fact that I only have one rather picturesque photograph of our street from that day (before we’d seen the house) and then nothing else whatsoever. It’s OK though, we were only in shock for a day or two.
Hard Wear
Thursday, 24 June 2004
Have sent M, bouncing like a deranged labrador, off to Bunnings. Wandering the aisles of Bunnings is something that has taken, oh, about 2472 hours out of my life to date, however - yesterday was payday and he has gone, clutching the bankcard, for renovation supplies. Urgently needed renovation supplies. We are so close to being able to demand our $6000 back from the bank that it’s torturous. The front door badly needs a big bit of glass in it (although it has been nice, huddling under the sleeping bag pretending we’re in Hobart) and we rang around this morning getting quotes. They were all over $100. The horror. M went and poked around out the back and came inside to announce that we could do it for $30. Fingers crossed. I am v.tempted to fax the bank the relevant papers on Monday, in the knowledge that it will probably take them at least two weeks to get themselves organised, and we can spend those two weeks finishing the bits and pieces. The jury is still out on this one.
In other news, Old Manky has moved into the new palace - though she seems to find it hard to understand that I’m actually supposed to be working three days a week, and thus just can’t pop over for a visit. (Popping over inevitably entails at least two hours and scary $2 Shop teabags soaked in *gag* town water. Manky.) I think tomorrow will see me finally making the visit - the bottle shop is on the way, after all. Compared to what I’m supposed to be researching, the prospect of painting window frames for the next four days has a beautiful rosy glow.
Window Pain
Sunday, 4 July 2004
Sometimes I think I am going to be trapped in Hervey Bay forever. More to the point, I feel like the guy who keeps pushing that stone but never gets to the top of the hill. This house is never going to be ready to sell - even getting it up to scratch to claim the money back that the bank owes us is taking ages. I got up this morning, stout of heart and spritely of step, to see how many windows I could get done i.e. remove the five panes of glass from each window, sand the frame, paint it outside and in, clean the glass of old paint smeared on by former occupants, put glass back in windows with new putty.
How many did I get done? Not even a pair. Taking the glass out took me so long, that the furthest I got in the whole scheme of things was removing the glass from three separate windows (fifteen panes), sanding two window frames and painting the outsides. *Sigh* It seems never ending. My tail had very little wag left by the end of the day. However tomorrow I will work quicker, now that I’m a bit surer of what I’m doing.
Elevenses
Monday, 12 July 2004
Thank god for elevenses - it’s are the only thing that gets me from window to window. Only ten minutes ago I was up a ladder, adorned in headphones, safety glasses and respirator mask - and that’s just my head! Things are hotting up as the house is being inspected by the valuer on Wednesday or Thursday to make sure that it’s up to scratch. If it works out, we get back the money the bank originally witheld - which we will then use for the purpose of tarting up to sell (and knocking some utility bills on the head). So we’ve got a couple of days - and still have ten windows to go. It’s so unfair. The house is Vogue-bloody-Living compared to what it used to be, but the bank is only interested in windows, outside paintwork, reparation of rotten boards and the dilapidated vanity unit in the bathroom - plus a few wiring and plumbing issues. Gah. Back to it.
Tentative Triumph
Thursday, 15 July 2004
OK - so I may have been pigeon-holing the faceless man I faxed my receipts to (for the work on the house). I imagined him as a desk-bound, power broking despot with the power to make my life hell if he felt like it. I was wrong. He called me up today, and I actually began to wonder if I’d met him before; he was someone with a quirky sense of humour and a sympathy for my time in house-buying hell. He told me that by reading between the lines of my fax he felt that he could safely assume he was correct in thinking that I would like the money put straight into my bank account. I told him he had interpreted my thoughts exactly. He said the money should be in my account by Saturday, or Monday at the latest. I didn’t say anything, because it’s hard to speak when you’re gaping. He asked if that was OK with me. I almost burst his eardrums with my assurances. Unbelievable. I have nothing bad to say about this company. In fact, I will refer to them by name and say that everyone I have dealt with at Resi has been kickass. It’s their credit provider/lender Perpetual Trustees Victoria who tempt me toward homicide.
M and I are separate puddles of intense relief. There is nothing hanging over us now. We have the money that we’ll need to tart up the garden, make the sunshades for the windows…etc etc. Not to mention a celebratory dinner on Fraser Island and some new shoes for M. Wah HOO! And it’s just about to rain for the first time in about a month. It’s all good 
Funds Deliver Relief
Friday, 16 July 2004
I spent a small chunk of today gazing at my account balance online. I looked like Cartman, when he is especially joyful. The bank delivered! Huzzah! Thus M and I (with stern reminders to each other that the money must be spent on the house and some of it saved for moving south) drove into town and bought a slab (sorry…a carton in Queenslandese) of Coopers Sparkling Ale, a bottle of Jamiesons Run Chardonnay, a chocolate eclair and went on a big stonking $100 supermarket blitz. All very affirming for me - Taureans take great comfort in material objects, particularly if they can eat them too.
Then we hit the op-shop, and as well as a shirt and a jumper, found a totally cool set of six matching chairs and a table - 1950’s laminex style. The kind that people flog off as ‘retro cool’ at Camberwell Market for $200 or so. Up here in Hervey Bay there is little call for ‘retro cool’, and we snapped it up for $80. M is now out the back tending the fire, and I have wrapped up the four fish he caught this morning (he was in a solitary, masculine, where-are-my-friends-with-penises-you-don’t-understand-me kind of mood) in foil with lemon, garlic, onion, salt, pepper and a bit of olive oil. Plus some potatos and corn. I allowed him free rein at the video shop and thus we’re going to take in a bit of Russell doing his swashbuckling thing tonight. I chose Monsoon Wedding, which I’ve been meaning to see for just about ever.
Perplexing
Sunday, 22 August 2004
I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but about a month ago my boss inquired whether the house was on the market yet. I said it wasn’t, did he want to buy it? He said he’d thought about it. The next I heard on this train of thought was when he said that his wife’s sister would like to look at the house, as she was going to be nearby. I provided directions, the flooplan, pictures, etc. and thought no more about it. My boss is completely vague at the best of times; so when he said last week that this woman would be in town this weekend, and could she come and have a look, I was amazed. M and I tidied rabidly, thank god, because they rang this morning and turned up around lunchtime. It was a little odd, because the woman let slip that it wasn’t her that was interested in the house - she was here to scope for my boss and his wife!? Very weird. Anyway, she and her husband stayed for over two hours, drank some coffee, looked around a bit - it was all a little strange as they never really referred to why they were here, and we were too shy to ask.
Anyway, they loved the house, but it will probably come to nothing. We’re not really fussed, because the house still needs a carport and the garden fixed up, so we’re not really thinking of selling right now - but still - it’s good to follow up all leads - who knows?
Flying Close to the Edge
Friday, 24 September 2004
We’ve gone through the money we got back from the bank, and my long awaited tax return has been whittled to nothing by sheds, soil, landscaping and bills. Today I spent our last $4.40 on two loads of wash. I went to the coin laundry that’s 20cents more expensive but is near the water - so I swam while my clothes (and the guest towels and sheets) got themselves cleaned up. I got home, salty fresh, and encountered two good things. One was an offer in the letter box, from the evil Commonwealth Bank, to increase my poor exhausted credit limit - and the other was large mounds of dirt and rock that M had wheedled out of the shutupandstopit from next door. We will use it as a base for the little concrete slab, and to fill the dam out the back. There’s heaps. Literally. So we have decided to use the extra bit of credit limit to build the laundry and the fence and then (fingers crossed) we should be ready to sell up. (Although if M reads this, he will just shrug in a kind of Latin manner, and look to the sky and repeat his mantra; “there’s still a lot of tweaking to do…”. Grand Final tomorrow. Think I might be going for Brisbane…for purely geographic reasons, and the lack of a Melbourne team…of course.
Fill It Up!
Saturday, 25 September 2004
Last night:
This Morning:
B Did a Bad Bad Thing
Friday, 22 October 2004
I’ve hardly touched my computer this week - this is due to M and I being determined to finish the house in the quickest possible time. It is also due to my extreme politeness - instead of spending my nights on tweaking webpages and blogging, I have been hostessly - playing new card games, reclining on the couch and being generally conversational. Small Brother is being very handy to have around - he and M have built a very cute little laundry, which will help the house along, and now he is working on a path to the front steps.
Unfortunately the progress of the house has me to contend with. Our back room has two walls of louvre windows. They are manky, to put it mildly. I decided that my first assault on finishing the house would begin in this room. We painted it a year ago, but it is now coated almost entirely with bugs and the louvres have never been cleaned. Think of the dirtiest windows you can, and then multiply the dirt by seven. So I took out one wall of louvres and washed them all, chipped of paint splashes etc. but almost as soon I’d taken out the first lot I realised how disgusting the frames were. Rusty, cobwebby bleugh. So I found some KillRust: Superior Protection Epoxy Enamel - it’s very cool, because it’s silver - so I thought I would make the frames look new. I also thought that I’d better begin doing this while M and Small Brother were at the tip, because I knew M would frown on it as ‘unecessary’ and ‘too time consuming and fiddly’. That was my first transgression. But really, that’s nothing compared to what I did next.
The house is pretty filthy - a combination of all the sand that we’ve spread around outside, general dust and accumulated debris. Last night - after a very exhausting day, I decided to do a quick vacuum to get rid of the worst of the sand. I did the back room, the kitchen, dining room and a bit of the lounge. It was then I noticed a lot of scratches had appeared on our beautiful polished floor. In fact, they had appeared everywhere I had vack-ed. OMG. I was in BIG trouble. Not only had I trashed our lovely floor, but I had trashed our lovely floor that M had sweated blood over. M came in just as Small Brother and I had cracked open a stubby of Coopers Sparkling each. I set my jaw and grimly owned up to what I’d done.
“Don’t worry about it darlin’,” said M, “it’ll be fine.”
My whole body sagged in relief. We played cards, watched Kath & Kim and, sat there horrified, as M consumed vast amounts of beer, the stinkiest blue cheese you can imagine, and some sardines. I instructed him not to come to bed before bonding closely with some Listerine.
The first words I heard His Stinkieth utter when he walked out of the bedroom into the dining room were anguished.
“Oh noooooooo.”
I immediately assumed that I’d walked in my sleep, emptied the teapot down the sink, and blocked the drain again.
M came back and put me straight. He was pale, breathing erratically.
“I’ve just seen what you did to the floor. How could you?”
He left the bedroom and I looked heavenward, waiting for a lightning bolt to wipe me out - or at least hospitalise me for a week or two. Nothing happened.
For the rest of the morning M did not speak to me - and when he did, he addressed me like I was a Liberal politician who had mistakenly stumbled on to the property. I felt bad.
Then he came and explained that he felt like I had taken his Humber out and crashed it. I felt worse.
I offered to lick each scratch, individually. (They seem to disappear a little with a combination of dust and spit.) M shook his head. He and Small Brother disappeared to check the crab pots. I don’t know what happened there, but when they came back, M said he was sorry for how he had treated me, that he knew it wasn’t my fault, but I was still an idiot for not noticing sooner. I looked big sad dolphin eyes at him. He reiterated the Humber analogy. I slumped further earthwards. Then he made me a cup of tea, we kissed and made up. Mostly.
Just after that, Small Brother came into the kitchen.
“I’ve booked your skydive for 10am tomorrow morning,” he said.
M looked musingly at me.
“You’re going to jump out of a plane at ten thousand feet?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Good.”
Shine the Light
Wednesday, 24 November 2004
We have been losing sleep over our lightshades. ‘How domestic‘ you might think. But the thing is, we’ve been trying to figure out how to get replacements for what seems like aeons. When we first arrived and fixed up the inside of the house, we got some paper lightshades from Ikea. Big rice paper globes. Perfect for our dining and lounge rooms (which are, incidentally, both 4.2m x 4.2m - I had to measure them last night). They are cheap, they look good. But we couldn’t cope with the idea of a seven hour round trip in the car to get more. So I asked my mother.
I know she drives within spitting distance of the Moorabbin Ikea every day.
B: …we really need to get hold of some lightshades before we try to sell the house.
Mum: Lightshades?
B: Yeah, remember the big paper ones we have? They’re so full of manky dead bugs that they barely cast a glow. And they look hideous.
Mum: Just put the house on the market, no one’s going to care about the lightshades. Sell! Sell!!
B: [sighs through teeth] I am not going to sell the house with manked up lightshades - and anyway, M would have a fit if I even suggested it. So I was wondering…
Mum: [silence]
B: …I was wondering whether you could grab us a few from Ikea one day and just send them up in the post?
Mum: [for some reason, the accent gets more pronounced]. Oh. I don’t know. They’re so big. How will I wrap them?
B: [trys to bang head silently on door frame] Muuuuum. You send packages overseas every Christmas. You pack things I wouldn’t even dwell on. These are paper. They lie flat.
Mum: I don’t know how I’d send them. They’re so big.
B: You already said that.
Mum: Welllllllll.
[She says it in a dismissive way. She says it in a way that makes it clear that she is not going to be posting any lightshades in this direction any time soon. She says no without saying no in the same way that she did when I dragged her to the police station to sign a statutory declaration on which the fate of my house rested.]
I gave up. There’s got to be an easier way. If you can’t get through to the recalcitrant American, go around it.
So today I sent out a plea to the mailing list that I have with some of my friends. Within four minutes one of them was on the phone (having already called Ikea to make sure they had them in stock) saying that it would be no problem at all. She would even pay for them and we could pay her back in beer (the best kind of currency) when we got back to Melbourne. She just called again from the post office to confirm our address. Thank-you Rachael. You are going to get such a serious amount of beer from us that you better start making some flood evacuation plans. We love you.
Dab Dab Dab
Tuesday, 30 November 2004
Holy Crap! Tomorrow is the first day of Summer and we are still here. I don’t know what it is, but since our ’selling the house’ website went live yesterday, I’m feeling like we should be moving out any second. Which is so far from reality that I just had to type it out to make it clear to my own self.
Am jiggy on paint fumes, having spent the entire day painting dibs and dabs all over the house that either were neglected the first time around or have gotten manky and need redoing. Late this afternoon M’s sister called and asked if we wanted to come for Christmas at her place. I counted to three, and then said that we’d love to - if we were still in town. If. Though my horoscope does not bode well, as Mercury is in retrograde until Dec. 20th [sigh]. I would have less belief if the same thing hadn’t happened when I was trying to buy the place we’re now trying to sell. Now I know not to fight it…although, come to think of it, the stress was good for weight loss! Gah.
Cheese
Thursday, 2 December 2004
Just how much cheese does it take to kill a person? I may be being prophetical, but it is definitely probable that tomorrows breaking news will bring the headline “Two Dead in Hervey Bay - Unknown Causes” which will be quickly followed by “Death Due to Cholesterol Surge” which will be followed by the tabloid fodder of “Help! I Can’t Brie-ve” and “I Camembert It Any Longer”.
M and I are celebrating our apparently quite good housing inspection result. There really weren’t any screamers that we’d overlooked. We are one step closer (if we survive the night’s celebration - and if we don’t fall asleep first, having arisen at 4:30am).
Christmas? Already?
Friday, 24 December 2004
We’re very sad not to be in Melbourne for Christmas - the cards and things that have arrived via snail mail are our little glee creators. Yesterday the cd that some of my very creative friends put together turned up. It’s tres cool - all artworked and properly printed.
I also scored an excellent mix-cd from my friend over in I-Oh-Wah which I am listening to right now - mmmm The Cat’s Miaow! Of course I am predictably slack where Christmas cards are concerned - only sent out the local ones on Monday, and didn’t post the overseas ones until yesterday [angst angst]. I tried to explain myself to the lady at the post office - that Christmas just somehoe crept up on me and I’d had no idea it was actually this weekend; she just raised an eyebrow and said;
“You mustn’t have kids…”
“Correct. But I’ve got a boyfriend who I’ve left baking in the car, now gimme my stamps.”
(I made up that last bit.)
M and I can’t even concentrate on Christmas - we wanted to hang with my dad and sister in the country, drink some Grand Ridge beer and eat lots of cheese and oysters [sob] but stupid stupid money and potential house buyers thwarted our plans.We are now consumed by the fact that someone is going to inspect our house, possibly the day after Boxing Day. So I have been mowing like a fool in the midday sun, and M is feverishly making curtains. I recall in 2001 that I was in Marblehead, Massachusetts - and it was white with snow. I hated the snow, and I promised that I would never every whine about the heat again… but I’d never been stuck in Queensland for Christmas. There are few things, at this point, that I wouldn’t do for some rain and a house deposit cheque…
Skirting Boards and Salad Days
Monday, 27 December 2004
Have been cleaning this house for two days. Oh. My. God. Scrubbing down skirting boards, de-cobwebbing the ceiling, chiselling off mud-wasp cylinders…it is never ending. Of course, I scrubbed too hard at some spider mank on the wall in the front room, and instantly transformed the entrance into some kind of freakish squat with faded spots on the green ‘feature’ wall. So I painted over the bits I had scrubbed too hard. And it looked exactly like I’d panicked and painted over them hoping for the best. It looked like a two year old’s finger painting effort. So then I did the whole wall. This is just one indication of what my life has become. Thank goodness we have been out to dinner the last two nights - tonight with M’s visiting sister and her squeeze, and last night our best neighbours with the most stunning house (and Christmas leftovers!) - and this has meant we’ve only had to clean the kitchen once since M has resurfaced the kitchen benches.
The house, as you may have been wondering, is getting checked out for the first time tomorrow by the ‘prospective buyers’. We are giving them lunch. They’re turning up at around 11am - so I’m guessing we’ll be up and freaking out by at least 7am. I mean, it’s currently twenty minutes to midnight and I’m boiling potatos for tomorrows salad. Hello? I have bitten off all my carefully tended fingernails…all I have to trust in now is my horoscope. Oh - but if you’d like to send some good vibes in my direction, don’t hesitate!
Neutral
Tuesday, 28 December 2004
Completely exhausted. Have no recollection of ever posting Skirting Boards and Salad Days yesterday. Absolutely none. This morning whisked by in a film of sweat; mopping floors, washing dishes, hiding things in the van, making potato salad… They finally showed up at about 11:30am. M and I were alternately entertaining, enouraging, witty, and when the situation demanded it, thoughtful and wise. We listened, we chatted - we talked about everything in the world except why these people were actually in our house. We are no wiser, but not very hopeful. And so begins our advertising campaign (after we escape for a short New Year’s break - we need one!).
Destination? Rosebank.
Wednesday, 29 December 2004
M and I have been more social in the last five days than we have in the past year! We are taking off tomorrow morning on a journey to Rosebank, where we will meet up with Mung, Rach, Luka and their friends for a New Years Eve get together. We are v.excited, and had lots of fun late this afternoon turning our van into a campingmobile and packing a little suitcase of useful things: a porcelain 12 volt jug for making cups of tea, tins of things that together may create a dinner, metal picnic cups, tea bags, picnic blanket, can opener and matches… I have also snuck in my little 12 volt ‘motorist’s help light’ to spotlight possible van-stealers while we’re asleep in the back. Our surfboards are packed and at the ready - we really need a break!
I spent last night outletting my frustrations by registering our house on a variety of sites (safe in the knowledge that once it’s sold I will detonate the email address - I may as well have just handed out ‘please spam me’ invitations) - so now we grace the pages of three sites that take private sale advertisements for free. It would be easy to slip into a slump at this point, as we had been led to believe that the inspection yesterday would result in the handing over of a deposit cheque - but we’re keen to get away on our mini-holiday, and will battle the world into submission when we return. Happy New Year! How will I live without my laptop for the next four days? Argh!
190 Years Old & Kicking
Wednesday, 5 January 2005
Today M’s mother took me out to lunch along with her friend Nita who lives next door to her. Together our combined ages must have been about 190 years old. As I am housebound due to absent M and an unregistered Humber, M’s mother came and got me, and took us down to her fave cafe on the esplanade. We had a great time. It turns out that although she was born in Maryborough Queensland, Nita used to live in Yarraville right near where we lived for five long years. (Tangent: Have I mentioned that the lady who lives next door to us went to M’s primary school in the salubrious suburb of St Marys in Sydney? That’s weird.)
So they dropped me home and Nita came in for the tour. M’s mother is so nice - she is so proud of what we’ve done to the house - she’s one of the few people who saw it when we bought it and it looked like a squat. Nita loved it and said she’d try to think of people who might be interested. Fingers crossed. It’s too hot here for me.
Hot Under the Collar
Wednesday, 5 January 2005
Stress levels mounting. Applying to refinance the home loan (very adult sounding) - too bad they’ll probably tell me to bugger off because I no longer work full time. Then we’ll be living on rice and hiding from the debt collectors. On top of this, at work they are advertising my job. And they are not advertising the way that I was told they would. It is being advertised externally - not just internally inside the university. It is also fulltime (this is bad) for a two year fixed term (yeah, right). I’m supposed to be experienced in policy development and analysis (hee hee) - and no, I’m not going to link to it. The less competition I have the better!
(Am listening to a recording of The Breeders playing in Stockholm in May ‘94 - they are better than good. I need to get back to Melbourne and crank up the band!)
Lupus Strikes Again
Sunday, 9 January 2005
After taking me out for lunch on Wednesday and zipping me around in her little car, M’s mum went to hospital last night, again. I say again because she goes on average of four or five times a year. You just have to call up the hospital and ask for her by name and they put you through! Her lupus is acting up again - we went into the hospital to take her a bag of stuff and arrived just as her lunch arrived. M and I ate her sandwich, I drank her tea and had half her apple pie and custard - we asked what time dinner would be delivered…
Am trying to not dwell on house-selling stress for fear of becoming an incurable insomniac. We took a punt and spent our advertising money on an independent valuation and building inspection so we could give them both to the person who was so interested that he said he was going to give us a deposit cheque and asked us to ‘hold off on advertising’ until he came and saw it. That person was my boss. I don’t want to get done for slander or defamation - so I will just let you imagine the adjectives that I could apply to him, if I didn’t need to keep my job until this protracted renovation experiment is over. Adjectives are describing words.
I have submitted our website to 25 different real estate/classified sites so far, I do a few more each night. For obvious reasons I am sticking to the free ones - where we go from here depends on whether the bank approves my application to refinance the homeloan - if they don’t, we’ll probably buckle and go with an agent, if they do - we’ll launch our advertising blitz. A real estate agent called yesterday having seen our site online…I asked her how much it would cost for her to sell our house - she did something like add $18,000 to the asking price, divided the result by 40 and then added GST. It came to over $8000. Bwah-ha HA HAAA! Not on your life. M and I worked out we could employ a couple of people to fly around the country on a personal house selling publicity bandwagon for that much money. The agent sounded completely serious. I’ve only just stopped choking.
Victories and Muck Ups
Wednesday, 12 January 2005
The bank approved me! [Cue: wild dancing]
It is such a nice feeling to talk to the evil people at (for example) GE Finance and say “Oh. I’m overdue? By more than a month? That’s terrible. Well, I can’t talk now, but I will be paying the entire amount off in full within the next two weeks, so it’s quite alright if you’d like to hang up and hassle some other poor debt-swamped person trying to grapple with the Harvey Norman fuelled revelation of ‘12-months-interest-free-is-up-already? Your charging me how much interest?’
In other news, this site is claggy. I tried to change my links to become more google friendly, as deep down, I’m just a tawdry fame slut out for every link I can get, but in the process broke many things, including archives (thank you Ian, for pointing that out, you Byron Bay hippy). So I think tonight I’m going to try a [gulp] revamp. In the meantime you can get to archives here.
Debacle No.1
Saturday, 12 February 2005
We spent some of Friday night and all of today cleaning the house in readiness for a local woman who was coming over ‘in the afternoon’. This taught M the valuable lesson that we always have to get a name and number. Because after busting our arses all day, she still hadn’t shown up by 4.30pm and we had no way of screaming at her, except by driving through town and yelling at people who appeared to be likely suspects.
Unable to bear cooking in our now pristine kitchen, or eating at our pristine table, we went out for dinner to our favourite place - Angelos. Thank god there are people coming tomorrow so it’s not all for nothing.
Debacle No.2
Sunday, 13 February 2005
It’s amazing how much more there seems to do when you wake up in the morning to a house that you had considered ‘pristine’ the night before. We continued prinking and preening the property, even going down on our knees to pick up the tiny polystyrene beanbag balls that the satanist who used to live here dumped under the house, and which decorate the bottom of the back steps whenever we get a south-easterly. [Tangent: Then M decided it would be better to just vacuum them all out of the ground. It is because of ideas like this that I taped a sign to the vacuum cleaner when I bought it, which says; anyone who takes this vacuum cleaner out of the house for any reason whatsoever will die a miserable death, in which suction will play a part - or something like that. The vaccum cleaner now weighs twice as much as previously, due to all the dirt lodged in it, and I hereby predict (you heard it first here) that this is going to be one of those things that escalate into a relationship threatening situation, as I nag M to fix it and he studiously ignores me, then humours me, then completely blows a gasket and tells me to do it myself. /Tangent]
So it got to 1.30pm and the couple that had said they would arrive at 1pm-ish were nowhere in sight. Then they called and said they were stuck in Bundaberg, and it would be more like 4pm. (Why they went to Bundaberg when they live below Brisbane is something we didn’t dare to ask - probably they were looking at other, better, more wonderful houses than ours….gah.) M and I were so sick of hanging around the house and finding more and more stuff to clean, that we took off and went out to lunch, where I dosed myself with a Bloody Mary and he tried to kill off his remaining viral bugs with a shot of Chivas. We got home at 3.30pm and waited. Nothing. At about 4.15pm they called to say they were still ’stuck in Bundaberg’ and were terribly sorry, but that they weren’t going to make it. Somehow I remained polite and refrained from shrieking - though I do wonder whether they made it home in one piece after the evil evil thoughts I was directing at them.
This house-selling gig is totally dire.
Wait Staff
Sunday, 20 February 2005
Plans had been made to go out in Oomoo this morning, however…we got a call last night from someone a few streets away, who said they would like to come over and look at the house this morning. So the rest of our Saturday night was spent in furious tidying (and then collapsing in front of Four Weddings & a Funeral - John Hannah *sob*). They were due at 9/9.30am. We rose at seven and tidied madly. Of course they didn’t turn up. Bastards. M made two faux pas. He didn’t get their number, and he said we would be home until 2pm. God. So the house was pristine by 10am and we whiled away the hours. Thank goodness we had three other calls about the house, one couple actually drove by and took a tour (although we don’t want them to buy it, because the bloke is a complete dick and talked about air rifles and how ‘the land was obviously of more value than the house’ - grrr) but they were also interested on behalf of their daughter (poor girl) who is looking for an investment property.
We advertised in The Age a while back and had no response - but advertising in the Sydney Morning Herald was far better. I spent an interesting half hour on the phone with Kerry Rowley from Jenman on Thursday; he suggested we reduce the price a little and couldn’t stress enough the value of letter-boxing the immediate area. So M and I spent two evenings letterboxing: M drove the van and I rode on the towbar, clutching the roof-rack - jumping off whenever we slowed, to put flyers advertising our house in people’s letterboxes. We got the same response as we did from advertising in the Sydney Morning Herald! So tomorrow we are going to widen our net, on the assumption that people may know someone, or have relatives, that would like to move into the area.
Meeting with the Enemy
Thursday, 24 February 2005
Two separate people both recommended this particular real estate agent to us, so he is going to come and visit this afternoon. M and I have agreed on a list of questions we are going to ask him, including such gems as; ‘do you get kickbacks from advertising, and if so, can we have them?‘ and; ‘if we sell the house via one of the ads or leaflets that we have organised and paid for, do we still have to pay you?‘ and; ‘if we sign up with you, can we do so for only 30 days?‘. I believe that these questions will be answered with ‘no’, ‘yes’ and ‘no’. But we shall see.
We had a couple look through the house yesterday - they called and asked if they could come over in the next half hour.
“That’s fine!,” I chirped, “I’ll just clean up a bit before you turn up.”
Cue me: red faced running around the house with seven arms; one cleaning the shower, one hiding the mosquito net, one sweeping the back room, one beating me across the head for choosing that morning to defrost the fridge (i.e. flood the kitchen), one wiping dust from the floor with a chammy, one stuffing everything and its brother under the far side of the bed and one hiding books entitled Don’t Sign Anything and Trust Me, I’m a Real Estate Agent.
M strolled in admist all of this action holding a six pack of beer, and a beatific expression which meant (I have since learnt) that he’d bought a ride-on mower. I didn’t glance twice at the beer and instead began shrieking Clean, CLEAN. The couple turned up a few minutes later - they were young, which was new. They seemed to get scareder and scareder as M and I did the tour and the spiel, culminating in them doing a quick exit to their car about ten minutes later. So quick, in fact, that he left his pair of Nike Airs on the front porch, where they are still.
I could now go on to bemoan the time of day that they arrived, and how bad the mozzies were, and how I saw three on her arm and one on her back all at the same time, but I will bide my time and put together a special page, detailing the whole hellish selling experience.
Thank you. Goodnight.
Given up on the DIY
Saturday, 26 February 2005
Today was a complete write off. Another no-show on the house inspection front. At least this woman sent me an email…that I got after I’d cleaned the entire house.
We had our meeting with the ‘finance guy’ & it seems we cannot borrow that much. So that puts us out of the picture. Sorry to waste your time but I am very disappointed. I will just have to work harder & build more of a deposit but that is my problem. I wish you all the luck in the world in selling your lovely house.
Nowhere in there does it say “we won’t be arriving at 1pm as planned”. But maybe I’m just battle-weary, at least she bothered to write, and wished us luck. So there you have it. Tomorrow we are signing up with the agent we spoke with the other day [waves a sad goodbye to approx. $8000.00 -gasp]. We tried everything we could think of, and although we did get a good response, no one actually took the bait, they just nibbled all around it.
M and I are very over it. We called a truce yesterday and decided to go for a late afternoon sail. It took so long to organise all the bits and pieces, that it was 5pm before we left; we got halfway to town and realised we’d left our launching trolley behind. So we took a long walk down the beach and somehow ended up at a bar, had one beer each and walked all the way back. That’s about it, really. Oh, except for M knocking back a bottle of red, coming into the bedroom, tucking in the mozzie net under the mattress, and then standing there for a full five minutes, puzzling how he was going to actually get into bed.
The Pact
Monday, 28 February 2005
Soooo, today we shook hands with the devil, and asked him to sell our house. Quickly. The ‘For Sale’ sign is up; M and I are stony faced and stalwart. Of course, as soon as we got home from signing the documents there was a message on the answering machine from someone who is interested in the house - via our own advertising. My only consolation is that if she calls and asks to see it, she either won’t turn up, or will show up late and be eaten by late-afternoon mosquitos - as has been par for the course thus far.
…oh, if you’re bored, head over to dooce.com where at least 250 people have left comments detailing their most embarrassing moments - I’ve been cackling for an hour!
realestate.com.au
Tuesday, 1 March 2005
There is one place that we couldn’t get our house listed when we were trying to sell it ourselves - the real estate agent loving realestate.com.au (they don’t do private listings) - well, we’re on there now! I’m not sure why I find that a bit exciting, but we did originally buy the house via realestate.com.au so I suppose I’m hoping that we might find some people out there that might not have seen it otherwise.
Wednesday was weird
Friday, 11 March 2005
Have not, thus far, had time to even squeak, let alone blog. After a relatively (relative to last time) relaxed trip down to Melbourne, I was standing at the interminable baggage carousel and M rang to say that we had received and offer on the house! Revelation. It wasn’t what we are after, but it was quite near - so we decided to do a counter offer. Of course, I was unable to sign the documents - thus I had to arrange for them to be faxed to L’s husband’s workplace - L then had to hoon me into the city (where the traffic was so bad that I had to jump out of the car and run for it) so I could sign stuff and then fax it back. The same thing happened again and the very accommodating restaurant that we went to for dinner. Everything is still up in the air (and possibly shaping up for a sharp nosedive) as I type, so I will have to leave the story there…but the fact that someone was keen enough to make an offer is very comforting.
Later that night (after being driven by other nice people) to E’s house, I settled down on my mattress on the floor and prepared to cark it for six hours - hoping that I would wake up not looking too deathlike for my interview the next morning. Sleep I did. Only to wake three hours later in absolute fright…the kind of fright where you jolt out of sleep and breathe in so deeply that your toenails crinkle. I had been reading Joe R. Lansdale’s Savage Season on the plane, and a lot of it was so full on that I had to keep putting it down and taking little breaks. Anyway, it must have made quite an impression, because I awoke convinced that there was a Cottonmouth Water Moccasin on my feet.That’s right. I had the whole name in my head. After being rigid with fear for about 20 seconds, I realised that it was far more likely to actually be Sonic, E’s black cat rather than the only North American poisonous water snake. Logic comes slowly in the dead of the night.
House Gloom
Monday, 14 March 2005
So the bastards that made an offer got cold feet. They flew to Hervey Bay and said they were ‘too tired’ to inspect the house at the appointed time, they would instead come at 9am Sunday morning. Nobs. Poor M had his weekend totally wiped, and all his hopes dashed - after working his butt off getting everything looking like Ripponlea.
What they really meant by ‘too tired’ was - ‘we’re going to run around town and see what all the other real estate agents have to say about the house and the area’. Now there are only a few agents that have houses in our area - and they obviously didn’t go to them - because everyo