A new home?

There's no deadline being held over our heads but our landlord put the house we're living in up for sale last year, and recently he appointed a third agent to try and sell it for him. No-one ever thinks to consider the uncertainty any of this might cause the tenant! We sit on the sidelines wondering if our home is about to be sold out from under us, and trying to make sense of the changes we detect in the overall situation. What we deduce from the appearance of a third agent is that our landlord is getting quite serious about selling the property, and as the third agent hasn't even bothered to talk to us about things and is just sending people through with greater frequency, our suspicions seem to be accurate.

We've been "looking" for a while, but now we're really looking, in much the same way that our landlord is now really trying to sell the place, and today perhaps we found our next rented home. We went to see a 4-bed place in Korora, which is the suburb of Coffs Harbour that we used to live in before that landlord sold the house out from under us last time. This house is very near the sea: a track at the end of the road leads down a cliff-path and onto the beach, and it's all far enough from the highway that the only sounds in our ears as we fall asleep will be the wind and the waves. The yard is OK: not huge but not tiny and with a wooden under-cover deck area where we can put our outside dining set and the barbecue; there's a storage shed and a huge double garage where we might actually be able to park both cars. Inside the house is upside down so that the main living areas take advantage of the sea views and the breeze. Downstairs are two small-ish bedrooms, one of which would be E's, plus two large tiled rooms that would become my studio and M's office, together with a kitchen area, a large bathroom and a huge laundry. Upstairs is a large open-plan living/kitchen/dining room, a WC and the master bedroom/ensuite bathroom. Today was a stinking hot day and there was a lovely breeze and the views were fantastic. Now we're down to just three people in the family the house is a great size and I think it would suit us. All we have to do is jump through hoops and persuade the landlord and the managing agent of the same thing.

We've been working out the money, too, and it seems good. We'd be saving $120 a week in rent (because it doesn't have a pool or a tennis court!), plus about $3,000 a year in pool maintenance costs, plus the extra electricity costs of an ageing pool filtration system, and we'd save petrol as well as it's about 6km closer to town so all our journeys would be shorter. Even though it will cost us a fair amount of time and money to move I think we'd save over a year, and as the house is a long-term investment for its owners we aren't likely to be chucked out.

This sets the agenda for the weekend: we're going to be working out our cash-flow forecast for the year, trying to envisage a calendar for moving, and putting together all the documentation we need to go with our rental application. It's a long weekend here so M won't be able to put the application in until Tuesday morning (I'll be away all next week), so my fingers are firmly crossed.




A lovely glass of water because it's hot here at the moment