The house above is NOT our house. This is a house that is one block from the entrance to our kids' school. It went up for auction two weeks ago. When it was first advertised, I thought, "Hey! Let's buy a house close to school. Then I don't need to fight for parking at every drop off and pick up." It sold for $3.2 million. Even in Australian dollars, that's a good chunk of change. We will continue to rent for a while.
Before I start the tour, I have to say, renting here is a big hassle. I mentioned on Facebook the hoops we had to jump through to even secure a house. Multiple forms of ID, multiple personal referees, copies of bank statements and credit card statements, statements from your work stating how much you are earning - I felt completely violated by the process.
There is no Equal Opportunity rental here - agents collect multiple applications and landlords can decide which people they like best by whatever criteria they wish. If they want to choose a renter by skin color, by income, by type of job, it's all legal. The only thing landlords can't discriminate by is whether or not renters have kids.
Once housing is secured, property managers inspect your house three months after you move in, then every six months thereafter. In Western Australia, our property manager told me, it's every three months forever. And we need to ask permission, in writing, if we want to put nails in the wall to hang pictures. This is why you'll see lots of bare walls; I still haven't received permission to hang things yet.
Our rent is about $2800/month. To lend some perspective, we paid $1600/month for a four-bedroom house in Charlottesville, and our mortgage for our three-bedroom house in Owings Mills was about $900/month. Rents, like house prices, are really high here. Our rent was one of the least expensive we found for a three-bedroom house. Rents go down the further you get from the Central Business District of Melbourne. Our house is a 38 minute tram ride away from the CBD.
Agents list rents in "per week" prices rather than "per month" to make them sound less heart-stoppingly terrifying. We were looking at all sorts of houses when we first arrived, the highest rent being $900/week, which sounded okay until we did the math and realized that would be almost $4000/month. We quickly adjusted our expectations after that. We will have to wait for our big garden.
Our house is in an eastern suburb of Melbourne called Camberwell. It takes Joel about 20 minutes to drive to work. It takes me about 13 minutes to drive the kids to school.
This is our house, as seen from two directions. We have a corner lot, and there is a fence around the entire house except the driveway.
There is a bus stop in front of our house.
Our house has three bedrooms, air conditioning on the second floor (which is a common set up in many houses here). When we rented it, it had no fridge or washer/dryer. These are typically provided by the renters, and they go with you when they leave.
Below are some pictures of our garden. The back garden is extremely small, but it's big enough to hang laundry (now that it's warm most days, laundry dries faster in the sun than in the dryer.). We have a beautiful flowering tree in our front garden, and what we believe is an apricot tree in our back garden.
Fully plan on putting some flowers back here now that it's stopped raining every day.
Small garden, but big enough for quoits or downball. Not big enough for stomp rockets - we've lost quite a few over the fence that required covert operations to recover.
The photo on the right is one of our apricots. I hope I can get to them when they ripen before the evil magpies get them.
On the left is our pretty, pretty flowering tree. No idea what it is.
Below are photos of our living area and kitchen:
White carpet. G-d help us.
My favorite parts of the kitchen are the fridge, which is like my dream appliance, and the gas cooking, which is lightning quick. I bought the microwave soon after we moved here, but before I learned how to drive. I walked it home 4 km. on a borrowed dolly. Uphill.
Below are pictures of the kids' bedrooms.
Before we moved we had a whole basement full of toys. We downsized drastically, and the only toys left are in the kids' rooms.
The dryer technology here is not as advanced as in America. Very few laundry rooms have vents installed, so dryers either collect the water in a reservoir that requires emptying every six drys or so, or (like ours), has a hose that can empty directly into a sink. Without a vent, the dryer is pretty slow. A dryer cycle on my machine takes about 75 minutes.
Every house I've seen has a clothes line, though. Most people just hang their clothes to dry if the weather is accommodating. This is a win-win during warm weather, because a) electricity is very expensive here, and b) the dryers are so crazy slow it's faster to hang the clothes in the sun. In the winter, when it rains almost every day for at least part of the day, it's more challenging.
Last but not least is a view of our street that I dodged traffic to take. We like our street because it's leafy and shady and wide. In another post, I'll show you what many residential streets look like, and the challenges I face driving down them.
Hope you enjoyed the tour!
Hi Catherine! Not sure if our house is "wow" material, but it does feel more homey. We're preparing for Halloween now, and I can't help but remember our last Halloween with you two. Miss you!
ReplyDelete