10 things I don't like...

...about our new house.

1. Too many trees. (trees= spiders in Australia)
2. Ducted heating (holes in floor= possibility for spiders to enter building)
3. No air con!!!! (or AC for us Aussie's)
4. Too many low cupboards
5. Pathetic showers (no power showers here!)
6. Very small study
7. ....

....well, wouldn't you know, I ran out of things!! There are more things that I like than don't like. Hurrah tha's got to be good!
Pray for cold weather and lack of bugs and I may even see this place as home!

Love Helen***

10 THings I like...

...about our new house.

1. It has beautiful decking out the back.
2. The kitchen has lots of workspace (NOT for Chris to make more mess in please!)
3. Ensuite bathroom
4. Fly screen doors
5. Peace and quiet
6. Darkness at night
7. OUr furniture fits!!
8. Privacy
9. It's shiney and new
10. We're on a 12 month contract- no more moving for at least a year!

Love Helen***

Down-time

Hi everyone,

Just a short note to say we'll be offline for the best part of a week while we have the broadband moved over to our new home.

We are in the advanced stages of packing (panicing) all our stuff, and the removals firm is booked in 48hrs from now. All is left for me to do is dismantle the beds (no mean feat for our bed), the desk and the dining table.

helen has a couple of girlfriends coming round tonight to pack up the kitchen, and I have a friend coming tomorrow to start the process of moving....

Happy days!

We cant wait to be in the new house, and to get settled again - this last few weeks has been somewhat frenetic.

See you all soon,

Chris

ps, if you didn't get my mail re our new address, submit a comment and we'll respond soon!

Wow what a week...

So here we have it, we applied for the house last monday at 9am, and we received a call at 11am saying 'they would be honoured to take us on as tenants'.

Woohoo.

So then started the mild hysteria about moving, all the work we have to do etc etc.

We'll it's now saturday night, and we have done a little work so far in amongst out other responsibilities - I agreed weeks ago to help out a mate who was moving house this weekend - he had hired a 3 ton truck to move all the big stuff.

Today turned out to be the hottest February day in 40 years, topping 40c mid afternoon. Our house is like a sauna. The AC has worked a trwat downstairs, but up in the bedroom it is currently 34.3c at midnight. There is no way of cooling it down. I am seriously considering sleeping on the sofa tonight, and hope that helen doesn't think I have fallen out with her!

This has been a roller coastr of a week, what with all the house stuff, but also because I have been given a promotion of sorts. It has been mooted for quite some time that our organisiation needs to develop the careers of it's technical staff - after all, we are the ones keeping the comapny running as such. So, with this in mind, I am now officially the Australia and New Zealand Territory Qstar Specialist.

What this means is that I am officially recognised as a guru in this area, and a single point of contact for other engineers throughout the territory. Beyond that, my managers want to promote this further, as there is an opening for a 'Regional Specialist' - someone who is a Single Point of Contact (or SPOC) for the product management in the US. This is something I have wanted for some years, to be recognised for my abilities and to have the opportunities to travel throughout the region (the whole of Asia Pacific, Japan and China) to fight local issues with this particular instrument. Most of the time, this will involve remote troubleshooting, with asuperb tool called Webex. We use it all the time in our company, and allows the direct control of a customers's instrument to allow us to troubleshoot.

Anyhow, I am waffling, but the first step in this will be happening in 2 weeks time. I wil be travelling to Taiwan for 2 weeks to train and mentor 4 of their local engineers. Our business out there is pretty good, but there have been issues with how the engineers have been working, leaving the customers unhappy with the quality of their job, and showing their lack of skills.

They will be attending training courses in their respective specialities, but prior to this it was thought that some one-on-one mentoring would benefit. So that's where I come in, I hope, to inprove their confidence, and get them on track.

As you may know, today sees the start of the chinese new year celebrations, and helen and I have just returned from Box Hill, a nearby suburb, with a very high proportion of Chinese migrants. With this in mind, every year the place comes alive for the Lunar Year celebrations and we wanted to go and see the street party.

So, I now have a gift for my colleagues in Taiwan - we found a stall that was doing personalised calligraphy, so I asked them to do this for me - It says " Greetings from your friends in Australia"

It is the done thing in Taiwan to exchange gifts when you meet colleagues for the first time, so I will let you know what they give to me!

Ok, it is way ast my bedtime, I better go and try and sleep in this opressive heat!

Catch you all soon....

C

A week on....

Ok, so it's been 8 days, I know.

But as you all know, things have been pretty insane in the past 2 weeks since we got back from Perth. After another day of frenetic toing and froing from one house to another looking for our next home, we have finally found somewhere we like.

It's funny how things work out actually, purely because this particular house was viewed by us over a week ago. We liked it then, but we had reservations about the size - it was only 2 bedrooms, and the lounge seemed small.

For those who don't know, when we arrived in Australia, we bought en enormous sofa and two armchairs. As lovely as they are, they've become a bit of a pain because of their size. We have turned down at least half of the viewed properties because of lack of space.

Anyhow, early last week, this property was bugging me, so I managed to arrange another viewing, early on wednesday morning. Armed with my trusty measuring tape, I proceeded to measure up the lounge, dining room and master bedroom.

We have a lovely bit of software called Microsoft Visio, so having got to grips with how it works, I was able to draw up a plan :

And from this, we were able to say that yes we could move in to this house, but it would be a squeeze. I think we have been spoiled with this house we are in now.

So Just yesterday, having come away from several very disappointing viewings, we were both a bit disheartened. I suggested we drive up to the house that kept bugging me, and take one more look. AS it happened, the place was open for inspection again, and we took the opportunity for one last look.

Tomorrow morning I will be submitting an application to become the new tenants of this place. It is available immediately, so we could well be in by 25th feb. So, if you are of a religious or spiritual nature, please pray for us, that the agents will choose our application over anyone elses, and let's end this frustrating time!

Moving on to a much lighter note, we have just returned from the last four days of house sitting for a family in our church who have just got a new puppy. They had to go to Brisbane on business, so we had the priviledge of looking after their house (with a pool!) and their gorgeous little staffy-labrador cross called Rusty.

She was an absolute tyke, so full of energy, and had razor-sharp teeth to boot. Helen and I have come away with multiple injuries, but more importantly, in the few days we had with Rusty, taught her some life-long bad (or good) habits

• how to chew shoes and not fingers
• how to jump up onto the sofa
• how to not be afraid of the swimming pool
• that chewing holes in balls is good

I'm not sure we will ever be asked back! Anyhow, here she is....

And so it seems

...that real estate agents are not always truthful in their descriptions of properties...

What a day we have had. After an early start, we were both very eager to see this place over the road, in which we have been very excited about all week. We arrived and were met by the agent, who quickly realised she had been given the wrong keys for the house. After all I was expecting - the hordes of people to view the property, we were the only visitors.

Anyhow, she was very apologetic, and promised us we could come and see the house in the afternoon, after she had gotten the right keys. So, we progressed to the other places that were open for inspection.

The first place, here, was actually quite nice, I rated it a 7/10. there was a fair amount of interest, but we both felt it was let down by the following points:

• No Aircon, just evaporative cooling - making it quite ineffective in the very hot days
• Possibly too big for us, we'd possibly 'rattle around' the place.
• We were greeted by a lovely hunstman spider as we entered the proeprty, giving Helen the heebygeebies

Next on the list was here. When you look at the web brochure, it actually looks very nice, soemthing a little older, and reading the blurb sounds good too. We arrived to be greeted by the agent - a chap by the name of Simon Coombs. I have been trying to call this guy all week, leaving messages on his mobile, with his secretary too. And there he was about to show us this property. I kept calm, and wanted to give him the benefit if the doubt.

As he was unlocking the doors, he made no apology and said simply "It needs a really good clean". Rather dubious. He wasn't wrong, teh floors were filthy, and as I walked into the main lounge area, I was ensnared in spider's webs. I moved into the study area, again to be captured in webs. The smell was not too pleasant either. So we left. That place did not need cleaning, it needed cleansing with FIRE! I also made known to this chap my disappointment with him not returning my many calls. I don't think he will be getting any of our business in the future.

The final visit was to here . Helen's spidey senses were aroused by the wording 'cute' and 'sweet' in the description. Again we found that pictures can be decieving, and we spent only 2 minutes in the property, before exchanging a knowing glance, this was not the place for us.

The we got 'the call' from the dippy girl this morning who had the wrong keys, to say she was at our favourite house for us to inspect.

I was all excited, thinking yes, after all the disappointments so far, we would just walk in, fall in love and that would be it. I would swing my master plan into action, and we'd be all moved in before march.

Well, here it is - it was indeed a lovely house, as I walked in, it really had a sense of 'this could be a home, not just a house'. The downstairs was lovely, a gorgeous backyard / suntrap, lovely kitchen, the lounge would have been just about big enough for our furniture. An upstairs we went.

The bedroom was like a loft room, with a sloping roofline, leading through to the en suite and walk in wardrobes. It was tiny. I was deflated. There was nowhere to put our desk, and we reckoned that our bed would have dwarfed the main bedroom.

I'm still gutted now. I guess there's several important lessons here - first, make no opinion of a property until it has been seen. And second, take any kind of descriptions of properties as a randomly generated set of facts that very loosely fit the property in question.

Hey ho, the search goes on. Although I feel pretty crappy about this whole thing, and especially so after today's viewings, I do know that good will come out of this, and we will find somewhere thet we can be happy with.

I am decalring a total ban on all ineternet searching of properties in this house until at least monday.

Catch you later

C

More new beginnings

Ok, so now we have got over the initial shock of monday's shenanigans, and we have started in earnest loking for our new home. There are two major websites that deal with rental properties in australia, here and here, making it much easier than the old fashioned way of trauling all the local newspapers, calling up agents and generally doing a lot of leg-work.

So, anyhow, we have shortlisted a bunch of houses, of varying prices and modernity and are awaiting the mad rush this weekend. You see, in australia they do things a little differently - they open up the houses for public inspection, at which point there is a huge scrum of people to view. I heard one friend saying that they went to see a house recently, and there were over 150 people all vying for the same thing. Then there is the mad rush afterwards - the on-site agent performing the inspection carries with them a handful of application forms, so people can take them away and fill them in at their convenience.

The truth is, as we found last year when we moved into our current property, it is a case of first come first served - you are forced to make an on the spot decision, sit in your car and fill in the application form, and it seems that the first people to get the form into the agent's office is the winner. Call me sneaky, but I am looking for ways to get around this.

So, Helen and I are very interested in a particular property, the observant of you out there will see it is a stone's throw from our current house, so here's my plan. They are opening for inspection this coming saturday, time tbc. So, I am just about to head out to the agent's office, where I intend to use my wit and charm to obtain a couple of application forms, get them filled in ready, and when we see the place, if it is right, "We'll take this one please"!

No messing, and no competition.

Ok so thats the plan, will keep you posted of developments.....

C