Boxing Day sales.

Yesterday we went to the Boxing Day sales and spent a whole lot of money! We spent two hours in Harvey Norman getting a new washer, dryer, fridge and TV. Good deals on all of them too, it's so handy having the internet on your phone! You can look up the prices that you can get them elsewhere and bargain away. Michael wanted a 3D TV, and the retailers seems to be pretty keen to offload them! The one we picked up came with all this extra stuff. Pretty cool.

What's also cool is that we had lots of gift cards to spend, mainly engagement gifts that we were saving until we'd bought a place. We got some really nice pots and pans from Myer at 50% off, and we went to KMart and got lots of little bits and pieces the I knew we needed. I can't wait until we get everything in the new place. Michael's busy now organising internet connection and gas and electricity.

Still a week until we get to move in. Seems like forever!

Flummoxed by floorplans.

I've been trying to wrap my head around the DA approved plans for the extension on the house. I'm really not good at visualising spaces from architectural plans. Hopefully I will get a better feel for it once I can stand in the space and measure it out.

Floorplan of existing house

I already know that we want a couple of changes made- the plans include rendering the existing brick, yuck yuck yuck! Bricks look awesome and are much lower maintenance than render or paint. We want to match the bricks on the extension, which may be difficult but Michael's already looking into sourcing salvaged bricks to match it.

There's also a small section of the proposed extension that is weatherboard. I'm not sure why, perhaps there is a reason to use something other than brick. We'll have to get in touch with the architect anyway to make amended plans for council, so we can find out then why they chose to use weatherboard rather than full brick.

Other things that we want to change include the layout of the new bathrooms (must have giant shower!!), the kitchen, and change the placement of a couple of the windows. I'm also will not sure about the carport thing, I'm worried that extending the roof to create a carport at the front of the house will ruin that cute street appeal. We'll see. Again, I really need to be in the space to visualise what it's going to be like.

The waiting game.

So, we've signed the contracts and all that jazz, now we have to make it through that horrible phase- waiting for settlement. Luckily for us, the couple that we're buying from are keen to move in to their new digs. The only problem being is that it is the Christmas break, and all the solicitors of the world are jetting off overseas to sip cocktails on a beach somewhere, so no early settlement. With a standard 42 day settlement and needing to be out of our current accommodation before that's up we asked if the vendor would be interested in leasing the property to us under license. They were pleased with this arrangement too, so we're moving in three weeks early. So excited!!

There are so many things to get organised. Firstly, I can't even remember what I own because it's been is storage for nearly 2 years, and secondly there are a lot of 'big ticket items' that I know I don't have. This means that there is shopping to be done!!

I've spent the last couple of days researching thrilling topics like 'front loader vs. top loader' and 'to frost free or not to frost free?'. Good thing we can do all our big shopping in the Christmas/ New Year sales and have stuff delivered on the day we move in. Perfect!

I just have so many ideas about what we want to do with the house that my head is swimming! I can't wait until we're actually in there. We're planning to start renovations as soon as we possibly can, so I don't want to go nuts on buying furniture etc. I figure we can make do with the hodge-podge of stuff from my former life as a share-houser. It's so tempting though! I keep getting ideas about what I want to do with the new living area, and how I want to do the ensuite, and want to rush out and get stuff RIGHT NOW! The reality is that we don't have anywhere to keep things as we'll be pretty tight for space during the renos.

Temptation did get the better of me a little bit though, I have bid on a couple of art deco light fixtures on eBay. I do have grand plans for them, but more about that later!

House hunted!

After months of searching we have finally found it; Our Dear Little House!

The agent's photo of the street frontage

My fiancé and I had been searching for our first home for months. With a generous budget and an eagerness to put our creative minds to good use, we thought the search for the perfect house would be easy. How wrong we were! We looked at exactly 68 houses- some Saturdays we were looking at ten properties in a row.

Reaching desperation point after 2 consecutive weeks of invoking the '11 second rule' * on every house we saw we decided to advertise for a 'house wanted'. Couldn't hurt, right? We dropped a few hundred hand designed flyers and put an ad on gumtree. We got a couple of replies but none of the properties fit our criteria. We had one last-ditch effort before the Christmas period when all the agents are on holidays and the market goes quiet, deciding that we'd have to rent a place for a while if we didn't find one that day.

Thankfully, we managed to find 2 properties that week that we were interested in; one that was a Victorian home with some whacky 80s renos, and one that was a little 1950s single brick cottage that had some internal updates but a terrible floorplan.

The first went to auction on a Wednesday night, so we went along. The whole way over in the car I was nervous with excitement, but also somehow knew that we were not going to walk out winners. We figured it didn't really matter if we didn't win because we had that little 50's cutie waiting for us. Fate had that in mind for us too- we called the Real Estate agent for the cottage on our way out of the auction- a little negotiating was done and by 3pm on Thursday we had contracts signed!

It's not what we had in mind at the start of our search, but there is something about this house that makes it perfect for us. The plan for this blog is to chronicle our journey from a cute, dated but certainly liveable 1950s cottage to something truly special.



*The '11 second rule' is a commonly used real estate principle; the time frame in which you will know if you don't want to buy the property.