Oh man. What a productive weekend!

We did some shopping yesterday prior to going over to gypocalypse‘s place and then the Bavarian for dinner. Sadly we had to leave at about 9:30 since I was starting work at 5am today (yes, it’s bullshit. Fortunately they’re going to be changing it, but apparently it’s taking a while for some reason). At least I was working from home anyway.

Also, I didn’t actually do too much working as such. 😛 It was pretty quiet so I spent the time tweaking my Magic decks and ordered some new cards (I’m currently completely obsessed with the Innistrad block of cards — think really grim dark gothic horror. So awesome).

At the start of the shift I was definitely thinking I’d need to take a nap after I’d finished, but apparently I got a second wind (and possibly third and fourth). We went to Bunnings, bought a nice powerful drill (we’d tried with our little one and it just didn’t have enough grunt to drill the screws into the wood) and some other bits and pieces, then wall-mounted the dryer and then proceeded to re-mount the cupboard that we’d taken off the wall in order to put the dryer on it. I actually ended up using several pieces of wood left over from when we turned the garage back from an office into a garage (they’re still sitting in what is going to become the games room, since the council won’t take building waste as part of the regular clean-ups).

kungfupolarbear was busy as well, she helped with the manoeuvring of the dryer up onto the mount, made an EPIC amount of gumbo, a slow-cooked beef stew, and also tidied up the hedge out the front.

It’s now 10:19pm and I have absolutely no idea how I’m still awake. I have tomorrow off due to working today, so I plan on playing video games mostly. 😛

Also, I decided to buy the books that Game of Thrones is based off (A Song of Fire and Ice), mostly because I can’t be bothered watching it and I prefer reading. HOLY SHIT IT’S SO GOOD! Wow. I’ve been reading it on the train to and from work, which is a good two hours solid of reading per day, so I’m ploughing through the first book. Man. I’m vaguely annoyed that I’d never read them up until now!

…I should probably stop typing and go to bed now.

PS: Have I mentioned how much I love our new house? Because it’s really really a lot. Just being able to do all these things to it as we want. So good!

We had our housewarming today, and it was fantastic. It wasn’t huge, there were nine of us all together, but it was just so nice being able to actually have people over again. We had a barbecue for lunch then played about three hours of Cards Against Humanity, everyone was impressed with the house, and we got $150 worth of Bunnings gift cards as housewarming gifts!

YOU GUYS, WE CAN ACTUALLY INVITE PEOPLE OVER TO OUR HOUSE. It’s so good! 😀

We went out to get some stuff at the shops, came back to the house and as I was opening up the garage I realised the air had that wonderful earthy smell you only get out in the country. It’s absolutely glorious here, still totally quiet at night, and the air is crisp and clean.

We’re making pretty good progress towards getting everything unpacked, and it actually looks like a house that we live in, as opposed to a house filled with boxes and crap.

Eeeee!

We’re all moved in! \o/

We moved on Tuesday last week (the 28th), and it was surprisingly pain-free. The removalists we used were a pair of exceedingly Kiwi guys, who were “choice”, “broo”, and “cuz”-ing all over the place, it was hilarious. They’d done moves from our building before and knew how utterly absurd the layout was, and the removalist company suggested we get a guy in a ute as well so we could just load up the ute and ferry it out to the truck.

All three guys were really nice, and we got the moving-out part done in only three and a half hours. The moving in at the other end was obvious even faster, because they pulled right up into the driveway and just went straight in.

We’ve not unpacked everything yet, but we’re getting there. The house is great, and the whole area is dead quiet at night, and even during the day there’s not much noise. It hasn’t sunken in yet that this is our house, and that we don’t have to move again in a year or whatever. Not sure when exactly that’s going to hit, heh.

Unfortunately we’re still having to deal with the old real estate, bunch of arseholes that they are, as we’re waiting for them to pull their damn finger out and do the final inspection so we can get our bond back.

We’ve already done some stuff to the house… the garage had been converted into an office, so with the help of my parents and some power tools, we demolished the false wall (after having had to get a friend who is an electrician in to disconnect all the power from it) and pulled up the carpet and converted it back into a garage. The wall had been massively over-engineered, there were far too many screws and bits in for what it was.

The previous owners don’t seem to have taken too much care with some of the plumbing, and there were some leaks under the sink in both the kitchen and the bathroom which I’ve managed to fix with some teflon tape. There’s a structure out the back that we’re going to use as a games room, where I’ll be able to actually have space to lay out my miniatures to paint them, but currently it’s filled with the detritus from the false wall in the garage.

We’ve also spent a horrifying amount of money at both Bunnings and Ikea, but at least it’s a once-off thing and the stuff we bought will last us for years.

So in short, YAY HOUSE!

The settlement is booked for this Wednesday at 3pm! \o/

The bank continued their streak of being bloody useless, this time they managed to misread the title transfer document that had been sent. One of the seller’s names is “Louise”, and the bank came back saying that they’d need a new document because they thought it’d be written “Louisc”. It looks like what had happened was that they didn’t actually bother to view the PDF at full-size, because both kungfupolarbear and our mortgage broker zoomed it into 100% and it clearly said “Louise”. Unbelievable.

ANYWAY. That’s all past us now! We’re going to pick up the keys on Saturday and go over there and generally inspect things. The previous owner had converted the garage into an office and had put carpet and false walls up and such. That would have been fine and we’d have been able to pull it all down ourselves except that it turns out the false wall that was put up in behind of the garage door actually has a bunch of power points on the other side of it, so we’re going to need to get an electrician in to disconnect all that first.

In the grand scheme of things it’s really not a major bother though.

\o/

So we’ve now paid the stamp duty (all $16,435 of it, ouch) and pretty much everything is all set for the final settlement, which is on Monday the 13th of this month.

YOU GUYS, WE’RE GOING TO OWN OUR OWN HOUSE!

I can’t emphasise how much we’re looking forward to NOT LIVING IN THIS GODDAMN AREA ANYMORE, holy shit. We’re booked in with the removalists for the 28th of this month, which is a Tuesday. kungfupolarbear is taking the 27th, 28th, and 29th off work, and I’m taking the whole week off, mostly because I have a heap of annual leave and hey, why not!

The move from here is going to be horrible, given how incredibly idiotically it’s laid out, but it ought to be far faster at the other end. We’re planning on giving this current place only the most cursory of cleans because fuck the current real estate, and whatever we get back from our bond we’ll just take as a bonus.

To sum up: EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Good bloody christ this week has been an emotional rollercoaster. Gah.

So the whole week we’d been chasing up the conveyancer and the mortgage broker because the cooling-off period ended at 5pm on Friday. On Thursday at about midday kungfupolarbear got a call from the mortgage broker saying that the bank hadn’t received her permanent residency paperwork, which we had definitely included. She told the broker as much, the broker called the bank back and whoever it was that she spoke to found the “missing” paperwork in no time at all. We were told that they’d have to start the whole process over again and someone else at the bank would pick our file up and run with it.

We were fairly despairing at this point, and we scrambled to call the conveyancer to get them to extend the cooling-off period to Monday. We didn’t hear back from that until later in the afternoon, though they said it was fine. The mortgage broker said she’d escalated our case and marked it as urgent, but we were seriously bummed out and expecting that we wouldn’t get the unconditional approval from the bank that we needed to actually proceed with the home loan.

Then late morning on Friday we got a call from the mortgage broker saying that we’d gotten the unconditional approval!! The sense of relief was seriously palpable, heh.

Today (the 20th) is my 30th birthday, and we started it off with dropping off the deposit off (all ~$45,000 of it!) at the real estate.

THIS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING OMG.

Speaking of birthday, kungfupolarbear bought me some wonderfully thoughtful presents, then we went out tonight for birthday Indian food at our favourite restaurant in Hornsby, then back to gypocalypse and his fiancée’s place for some games (our current place is completely useless for having anyone over, as the parking — and whole area in general — is retarded. Yet another reason we’re looking forward to moving: being able to invite people over).

Last night was Mongolian barbecue at Genghis Khan just near work which was a bunch of fun. And tomorrow we’re going over to mum and dad’s place for birthday lunch! It’s a weekend-long birthday food-fest. \o/

Also, holy shit, I’m now thirty years old! I always thought of that age as something that happened to other people. It’s weird being here myself!

I don’t want to say too much in case I jinx it, but HOLY SHIT WE SIGNED THE CONTRACT FOR A HOUSE TODAY! There’s still a bunch that could go wrong with the legal things or inspections or bank things, but we’ve put the deposit in and signed the contract which was the biggest hurdle!

We’d found a place last weekend that we wanted to put in an offer for, but within an hour the real estate agent had called us up and said that the owners had taken an offer already (one LOWER than the asking price no less) and wouldn’t accept any others. We were pretty bummed out as we seriously loved the place, and it was completely unexpected… we’d just gone to the inspection because it was there and at a good time.

Funnily enough the exact same thing happened this time. The photos of the place made it look tiny and fairly awful, but we got there and it was much larger than it looked and was really nice! It had actually been on the market for a few weeks, the real estate agent said that it’d been under contract the first week but that sale fell through as the people who were wanting to buy it weren’t able to sell their place due to termites.

So yes. Expect more updates during the week!

Also holy shit, it’s like we’re grown-ups or something!

We went to see two houses yesterday. The first one was a three bedroom place in a quite nice area, and was surprisingly cheap (the ad listed “$389k-$419k”).

The price should have tipped us off. My god it was horrible! The amount of photoshopping the real estate had done was just mind-boggling. The floor was not “floating wood floorboards”, it was lino in the pattern of wood, which was peeling up in places. There were scuff marks everywhere, the sink was uselessly shallow, the kitchen drawers didn’t even open properly, and outside was just awful. There was black mould all the way along the eaves under the covered area outside, the wood up the side of the house was all damaged, there was a shed that the door had partially fallen off from, and the back yard was all lumpy and not even remotely flat. Oh, and there was a “built-in barbecue” that was totally rusted and broken and would have needed to be completely removed.

Better yet, the (very used-car-salesman) real estate agent was loudly telling everyone who walked in that “they’re only taking offers today”, there were two other real estate agents there, and there was even a mortgage broker set up in the kitchen! The whole thing was just unbelievable. There were hordes of people that came to see it, I’m suspecting because of the low price.

The second place was actually really nice, and was $450k. It was five minutes walk to the train station, and the house and yard was immaculate. Unfortunately there were several problems:

– The main bedroom faced the street, which ordinarily wouldn’t be an issue except that it appeared that the street was a relatively busy through-road;
– There was no air conditioning in the bedroom (granted we could have gotten in put in, but still);
– The houses on either side were awfully close, and the one on one side was a two-story place that positively loomed;
– And lastly, and probably the biggest issue, is that the land on the other side of the road was a huge paddock-looking block that had been sold off and already split into yards, and they were clearly going to put a mass of houses up there, or possibly even units, thus making the street even busier.

So back to the drawing board we go.

In other news, I’ve noticed a funny thing… I’ll go through periods where I’ll do a heap of photography, but do next to no coding, and then other times where it’ll be the other way around. I just don’t seem to be able to do both in the same general time… I guess it requires a mental shift or something.

And lastly, we went up to mum and dad’s last night for some peace and quiet since I was working today (starting at 6am no less D:), and of course for the first time in months there was a party down the street. Thankfully it wasn’t loud enough to be audible through earplugs, but it was the MOST OBNOXIOUS temperature (there’s no aircon there). Clearly having spent the last two years with air conditioning has made me a bit soft, but it was either too hot or too cold. I ended up getting barely four hours of sleep and so have been a zombie the whole day. Fortunately work was pretty quiet and nothing required much brain power, but ughhhhh. I’m working again Sunday after next, and we’re going to see if the weather has cooled down enough that it’d be worth going up to mum and dad’s again.

::faceplant::

On Monday this week we went to see a mortgage broker to see how much more money we’d need to save in order to buy a house, and to generally get some more info on the whole process.

As it turns out we have enough saved up already, and the minimum payments we’d be making on a $475,000 place (our maximum limit) is less than what we’re paying in rent right now! We ended up applying for pre-approval for a home loan, and today we found out that it’s been granted (despite us not expecting it until next week some time)!

Holy shit we’re actually going to buy our own house! Even better, the mortgage broker showed us that if we put $1500 a fortnight extra payments on the home loan, we’d have it paid off in under nine years. Woah.

We’re looking at places in Quakers Hill, Marayong, and Kings Park. We’ve already been out to check out the area, and it’s quite nice… suburban, quiet, and on the train line. It’s 47 minutes to Central for kungfupolarbear and would be about 55 minutes to Wynyard for me, which is quite acceptable. We’ve got an appointment scheduled this Saturday to go look at a place. We’re certainly not going to be rushing into anything given our current disaster of a place. We definitely wish we’d known that we could have afforded a place this soon… if we had, we’d have just stayed in Turramurra and wouldn’t have spent a bunch of money on moving, and then another bunch when we eventually break the lease here. :\ On the slightly bright side, the lease for this place has a “lease break fee”, which basically boils down to us giving them a bunch of money but being able to end the lease whenever the hell we want.

So yeah. An actual place that we own. Exciting! 😀

The current place is still loud and obnoxious and everyone here needs to die in a fire. Poor kungfupolarbear has been at her wit’s end pretty much the whole time. But with any luck it’ll soon be over.