Huge Scope for Potential

The highs and lows of owning and renovating our first home. This is the account of a young couple trying to remain upbeat as the inevitable chaos of improving their new home seeks to dismantle them at every turn.

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#succulent #paradise with bonus #Pachycephalosaurus #trendinghashtagforsure #garden #marrickville (at 679 Marrickville)

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Carrot #harvest time #veggiegarden #marrickville #growyourown #gardening #guesswhatimhavingforlunch #anddinner (at 679 Marrickville)

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Looks like it's Orb Weaver season in #marrickville #spider #arachnawesome #dontwalkaroundthegardenwithyourmouthopen (at 679 Marrickville)

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Built-ins almost finished. Storage here we come #rennovations #whendidwegetsomature (at 679 marrickville)

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New screen door. Let the airflow begin (at 679 marrickville)

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Before & after. The grey looks much better with the new yellow door... 2nd coat to come #renovations #diy (at 679 marrickville)

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A Year in Review

Seven days from now we will have been in our first home for exactly one whole year.

We are still sane, still happy and now have two of the cutest cats ever.

We told ourselves when we moved in that we would live in the house for a full year before we started any renovations or modifications... and well, here we are, a year on and it's time to pick up the hammer and drill and get s@#$ done... well, that's the intention anyway.

Over the last 12 months we made lists of the things that we wanted to do, things that annoyed us and things that we thought would make the place better.

We did however, spend a lot of time in the garden and have made some big changes. What was a Bougainvillea-dominated jungle now has around 6 metres of garden beds with all manner of herbs and veggies growing. We absolutely love growing our own stuff and have had some great successes (herbs, chillis and cucumbers) and some monumental failures (capsicums, possum-ravished tomatoes). We also have a pretty good compost system going complete with accompanying worm farm. (We will be putting up some pics and stories on this later.)

For the inside of the house, here is a list of some of the things we've noticed over the year that we'd like to change (in no particular order... and far from exhaustive)

Skylights / Roof windows to let some natural light into the house

New fly-screens on just about every window in the house (the cats will be disappointed to lose their main escape points)

Built-ins in both rooms (the current second-hand ikea wardrobes are just not doing it for us anymore)

New front door (again to let some light in and so the front of the house looks good)

Security screen door at the front so that we can get a breeze flowing through the house without fear of being robbed

Paint the front of the house a nice dark grey so it blends in the with the plants a little more and looks nice and clean (the old heritage green, red and beige is looking very grotty)

New guttering (half our guttering has pretty much disintegrated over the last year showering the side of our house in pieces of rust)

New side gate that locks properly

Clean all transom glass panels and window mechanisms (they are all covered in a few decades of paint by lazy painters - we want the brass back)

Major reworking of the layout from the kitchen to the back of the house (there is a lot more thinking to do about this... but it will involve opening up the kitchen-lounge area a little and moving the bathroom and laundry to create a better flow and more storage)

New kitchen

New bathroom

New hot-water system

... I actually feel a little ill looking over that list now

But, feel excited all the same.

The plan is this: Do some "easy" stuff first and then do the big scary stuff when we have saved up enough (we are just over halfway to our renovation budget, so we reckon at the end of this year we will get the sledgehammers out and f#$% some s@#$ up)

And like all well-laid plans... we expect very little of it to go smoothly...

Bring it on.

E&L

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Saturday Morning Friends

So, we are only 3 days away from moving into our new home (f@#$!!!!!!!!!), and we were thinking about how glad we are that we don't have to spend our Saturdays riding around Sydney looking at hell-holes... but then we realised there were some things that we do miss...

While we were only really doing the Saturday morning house trawl for around 4 months, we kept seeing the same faces again and again. There's a healthy competition... We all think; if this place goes to auction, that sweet couple inquiring about the strata rules regarding pets could be your nemesis (and add another 2 years to your mortgage repayments...pricks).

Despite all of this, it's hard not to feel a warm glow of affection for a familiar face. Chit-chat was always along the lines of..."Loveridge St? 10:15am? They call that a bedroom!?!", or the slightly awkward "I guess we have the same taste in houses then! (We will destroy you)".

But how far does this friendship actually go?... would it be awkward to turn up to the first inspection with a coffee run? Or maybe some cookies for the gang? How about lunch after the last open house?... too much? We imagine that after months of searching and seeing these people every Saturday morning you would definitely form some sort of friendship.

What happens when they don't show up one morning?... Did they find a place? (arseholes) which one? (did we look at that one?) I wonder how much they paid (they can't afford that!?!). I wonder if anyone has noticed our absence?...

In any case, we became quite fond of our Saturday Morning friends... and kinda miss them.

So here's to you tall-quiet-couple, annoying-blondes and inter-racial-hipsters.

Maybe we will invite you to our house-warming.

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Home Owners Part 2: The Deal

After sitting at our friends place for around an hour drinking some well earned beers and drooling over the feast being prepared my phone rang and my heart started pounding... it was Sasha, our real estate agent...

I ran downstairs and answered trying to sound casual

"Oh, hi Sasha, yeah, well thanks mate, how are you? (fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!!!!!!)"

It turns out that our offer was too low... which we were expecting to be honest. We aimed low to see how desperate the vendor was... I mean we're still talking 2nd week of January here... so maybe we would get lucky. I asked what figure they wanted and the figure that he gave me was what we wanted to hear. Sasha told me that if we offered that figure the vendor would take the property off the market and the place was ours... I made a big show of um-ing and ah-ing and told him I'd call him back tomorrow with our thoughts... but we weren't sure. Check us out playing the game! (how little we knew...)

We then settled back in for the evening with our friends feeling pretty good about ourselves. The wine was great, the steak was even better (nice BBQ skills Dieuy) and we were about to buy a house. BOOM!

The next day we quite literally had to sit on our hands we were so excited... I had told Sasha that we would call him around 10.30 to let him know what we had decided... but the hours were going slooooooooowly.

10.29 came around and we made an executive decision that we had waited long enough, and we made the call.

30 seconds later, I had hung up the phone, fist pumped the air and walked back to my desk with swagger. we just bought a house... a freaking HOUSE!

The house was due to be open for inspection again the following weekend, so we wanted to avoid any counter offers, so we agreed to sign contracts that night and make sure we didn't get into a price war.

Sasha came around to our place that evening and we signed on the dotted line. All we needed now was a signature from the vendor and we were locked in.

Over the next few days we stayed in contact with Sasha to see when the Vendor was going to sign... turns out our vendor friend is a pilot and can only sign on Friday... all good... we weren't in a great rush.

Come Friday we spent the day checking our phones every 5 seconds to see if we had word from Sasha.

By 5.30 we were starting to get a little nervous... if we didn't have a signature, the open inspection would go ahead and we might be forced into a price war... not ideal for us.

At 6.20 when my phone finally rang, I was grinding my teeth and pacing around the office.

The vendor had refused to sign.

My first reaction was disappointment, and then anger, and then helplessness.

Sometime between the vendor telling the agent and us the figure that he wanted and hearing that we were happy to offer him that, he had a change of heart... at 6.00 on a Friday evening.

He wanted more.

At 6.30 on a Friday night, we had no chance of contacting our broker to see whether we could afford to offer more, and to be honest felt like we'd been tricked and lied to. Not a great feeling at 6.30 on a Friday night.

We had no other choice but to see what we could do on Saturday morning... we had a window of 3 hours before the house was due to be opened for inspection again.

We made a few phone calls to various people at the real estate and expressed our deep disappointment with the way this had been handled and asked how it had come to this. We'd been given no real opportunity to respond and felt trapped.

We were not feeling so good about ourselves anymore... in fact we felt more like little kids that had just been told Santa wasn't real anymore and that Peter Andre's six-pack was fake (there is no evidence to support this heinous claim).

Come Saturday morning we were wrecks... neither of us had slept much and we were still feeling pretty helpless. With some amazing help from Elian's mum we were trying to get the real estate agent to help us reach a compromise... it was a long shot... but time was not on our side.

With 50 minutes to go before the front door to the house was to be opened to the public again we were able to come to an agreement with the agent and the vendor.

The place was ours, and the open-house was cancelled.

I think we both aged a year over that 24 hour period... I would not wish that feeling on anyone (apart from perhaps the vendor).

So, with the contract signed, and a holding deposit paid, we were locked in. Now all we had to do was start the process of getting the money organised and everything that comes with it... and boy oh boy, is there stuff to do...

... to be continued in Part 3: The Purchase

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Home Owners Part 1: The Find

By now, pretty much all our friends know that the hunt is over! We successfully found, tracked and killed our first house. Winning.

The process left us bruised battered and a tad dazed... so we haven't had the energy to document our experience (and if anything went wrong we'd look pretty silly... or sillier than we normally do).

So, there will be 3 parts; Part 1: The find, Part 2: The Deal, Part 3: The Purchase (not finished yet).

This, being Part 1 will follow us on our first encounter with our home-to-be and our decision to put down an offer.

Here we go.

After Xmas the property market was pretty quiet... very few new listings and not many inspections. Despite having a break of Xmas, we soon felt pretty tired of looking at the same properties that we knew were just cleverly disguised dumps and shoe boxes.

We had been going through the motions as per usual; Checking properties online and shortlisting the ones we wanted to inspect, adding them to our phones and mapping the weekend routes.

There was one property that didn't have an open-house schedule, so we called the agent to ask about it. It was in Marrickville and we really liked the garden and its size (it was over twice the size of the last open house we'd been to before Xmas!). We arranged with the agent to have a look first thing on Saturday morning expecting to be blown away by how different it was in person from the photo's.

We arrived on Saturday morning to discover a lovely quiet street with lots of trees and quaint fences. There were quite a few people already there, but not as many as we'd seen before (this was pre-Australia Day, so everyone was still in holiday mode). The house was absolutely gorgeous and we were immediately taken. We were imaging where our stuff would go, babbling about how the picture rails were perfect for hanging up our pictures while outwardly putting on our real-estate poker faces (yeah, this is alright, but it is one of many we are looking at face).

After spending close to 40 minutes crawling all over the house looking for faults and damp we departed with the casual "this has been on the market a while hasn't it... not had many offers?". Apparently they'd had one offer, but it fell through last year... but they were expecting lots of offers after the inspection (of course you are).

We spent the next few days (2 in fact) discussing our options and testing out the idea of actually putting an offer down... could we actually afford it? could we see ourselves living there? how quickly would we need to act? was it too close to the flight path?

On Monday morning we put our business pants and started the process.

- Call the agent and ask for a second inspection so we could bring in a parent to help go over the place

- Arrange a meeting with a broker to see if we could actually afford it

- Start researching the street and area for anything out of the ordinary.

We arranged a second inspection for Tuesday and met with the broker who told us we could put an offer down. By Tuesday evening we had seen the place, agreed that it wasn't falling apart and made the call to our lovely real estate agent Sasha.

"Hi, Sasha? yeah, hi... we looked at the place in Marrickville earlier... yes, thanks for taking us through... yes, great, thanks. We'd like to make an offer.... (fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!!!!)"

When we hung up the phone we were so nervous... what if the vendor didn't accept our offer... what if they did?!? (fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!?!?!?!)

The next day was spent biting nails, feeling a little nauseous and getting excited all at the same time.

That night we were at a friends place for dinner and were expecting a phone-call from the agent to tell us yes or no and we could barely concentrate.

We'd found a house!!!!

... to be continued in Part 2: The Deal

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Phone Etiquette

If Saturday mornings are spent schlepping around looking for houses, then Monday mornings are spent fielding phone calls from every real estate agent in Sydney.

The sheer range of phone manners is just amazing. Here are some of the types that we've come to know and love:

#1 Brusque Betty: She calls, she inquires, she hangs up... sometimes even before you've finished answering her questions.

#2 Catch-phrase Cathy: She nails every possible real estate cliche in record time and doesn't really seem to hear what you say anyway... but hears a positive or negative tone and simpers her perfect response.

#3 Personal Patti: Takes your rejection to heart and really wants to know why you don't want to spend half a million dollars on a hole in the wall. Sometimes you almost feign interest so not to hurt her feelings... (Personal Patti commonly turns into Brusque Betty)

#4 Helpful Hilda: We love Hilda. She knows she is interrupting your day, and probably took the time to remember something about you at the open day "you were the lovely couple who were really really ridiculously good looking (as an example)", and truly wants to help you. She might even follow up with a few suggestions and give you some tips (from her list, naturally)

#5 Bored Beth: She really couldn't imagine anything less exciting than speaking to you (the feeling is mutual) and is just as enthused when you politely tell her that it's "not quite what we're looking for".

#6 Irene the Intern: (While this has only happened to us once, it is worth the mention) She has most likely been told by her supervisor / dad to call the list of people as a "good learning experience". You really want her to do a good job and help correct her if she makes a mistake (like getting your name wrong), and when it is time to say goodbye she doesn't quite know what to do, panics and asks her supervisor / dad in the background (voice in the background) "it's ok, you can just hang up".

Maybe there are more? Has anyone else met any other types?

All we can say is, it was lovely to hear from you Hilda, please call again and Patti, yes, it's personal, we think you smell like moth balls.

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So, Santa...what happened?

Despite several well worded letters to Santa, he failed to deliver us a house for Xmas...

Santa, if you are reading this, we are a little disappointed to be honest.

Perhaps we were ambitious in thinking you could fit a house in a stocking, but we thought you might have a solution to this... like, maybe simply leaving us the keys and a map (just like the end of Hot Tub Time Machine)... or just transferring some cold hard electronic cash into one of our bank accounts (you did get those details in the 4th letter, right Santa... it's not too late to do the right thing).

Or maybe your new "Naughty&Nice" social listening tool made a mistake and failed to show you just how nice we've been this year (we were so good it was almost sickening!)

It could have even been a simple logistics thing and we were overlooked... I mean, 7 billion people to deliver presents to on one night is a pretty impressive task... that's something like 822 houses per second... which means you'd have to be travelling at a speed of around 3.7 million kms an hour... not to mention that we have several different addresses listed between our parents places and our apartment (we did give you the preferred address though, right...it was at the top of all of our letters)

In any case, we are very grateful for the lovely candy that you left us in our stockings (you managed to find those ok didn't you...) and for the scratchies (we racked up a whopping $13 from those... which is probably some sort of record for us) and we hope you had an incident free Xmas night.

I guess we'll just have to do this the old fashioned way... and maybe shoot the Easter Bunny a note.

We hope that everyone had a lovely Xmas and Santa was good to you.

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This weeks "Best of Ads": Strawberries and Spelling 101

#1 Strawberries and Cream

No strawberries and no cream... it is close to Strawberry Hills...? we're at a bit of a loss for the cream bit?

#2 You're an idiot, your teacher would be mortified (we're sorry Miss Allen)

  What's with the inconsistent caps?...

As for your spelling, this might clear up the confusion:

(why a rat we wonder... the full animal kingdom to choose from, and they go for a rat...)

#3 Style meets Space

Space, this is Style, Style this is Space. We know you've never met before, at least not in Sydney, but we reckon you'll get along just great.

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How to inspect and look like you know what you're doing

To be honest, when we started we had little to no idea what we were doing... we were wandering like lambs into a den of dingo's.

Now, we are like lambs with steel wool, knives in our socks and mad kung-fu skills.

We've learned by copying people who seem to know their shit.

Here are some helpful tips to make it look like you're an expert:

- Tap walls

- Mutter something about rising damp

- Point to North and look thoughtful

- Jump on floorboards

- Talk about steepness of staircases

- Inquire about strata (what the hell is strata?!?)

- Test the acoustic performance of the house with various combinations of doors and windows open or closed

- Closely examine load bearing walls

- Identify at least one crack and look concerned

- Comment on the thickness of the kitchen bench (apparently 30mm is rad)

- Exclaim at least once "very little storage!"

- Look at the floor-plan and talking confidently about bashing through walls and opening spaces

Any combination of the above is worth bonus points and is sure to move you to the top of the inspection pecking order. For example, find a crack on a load bearing wall or inquire about strata while facing north.

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Last inspection for 2011

Today was the last weekend of the property search for 2011. We saw some good, we saw some bad, but we didn't exactly go out with a "bang".

Here are the highlights:

- We saw a place that had a mattress in the main room that looked like someone had died on it (EF nearly vommed)

- Within 5 minutes of walking through a place, we sustained no less than 8 mosquito bites

- We fell in love with a place that didn't love us back

- We saw a kid's room that made us very sad

- We saw the smallest room we have ever seen

- We rode from Newtown to Redfern in record time to make an inspection (EF nearly vommed)

- We walked into an inspection to find an agent we'd had a an altercation with no less than 2 hours earlier (awkward)

- We saw a kitchen that didn't have an oven or cooktop

- We saw a place that made us laugh (3 bed unrenovated dump with no light open to offers over $1mil)

- We saw a place that inspired us

So, we saw lots of places, none of them what we're looking for... but we did find, and kill, 5 caterpillars in our herb garden, so we're calling today a win.

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... what on earth

These guys have it far worse than we do... but we can totally relate to the the tiger-frog (such a baddass) and the birds home (which looks bigger than some of the places we've seen).

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All I want for Xmas

Apparently Xmas time is a little quiet for real-estate. There haven't been any new properties added in around 3 weeks, so we're running a little thin for places to see (or more accurately, want to see).

We're told that by mid Jan the market will be back up and running, which feels a very long time away (around 5 Saturdays in fact). So what do we do in the meantime?

Here are our options so far:

- Look at places that we've previously crossed off the list "just in case" the photos, floor-plan and location are actually amazing and the posting online was wrong (glass half full)

- Do some reading / research to get inspired (confused): Dummies guide to buying your first home, "expert" reviews on the property market (some say we're f#$%ed, others say there has never been a better time to buy)

- Take a break... a what? really... you mean we might have a free Saturday morning?.... sounds hard.

- Write a desperate letter asking Santa to give us a new house...we've been really really really good this year, we swear (and we've got Rudolf so if you want him back...).

We haven't decided what to do just yet, but we keep refreshing the real estate pages in the desperate hope that an amazing place is posted and no-one else will know about it but us (what are the chances?...)