Looking for the right one

Welcome to our very first blog!  enjoy :)

Having moved to the other end of the state for my new job, we decided to rent a place for a while until we were 100% convinced this would be the place where we wanted to settle for at least the next 10 years or so. We owned our place in our previous location, so rented that out for the time being.  It was pretty hard living in a place that did not belong to us, as we were so used to being able to do our own thing.  After about 8 months we started looking around on www.realestate.com.au which gave us an idea on the architectural styles in the different areas, yard types and what you really get for all those hard earned $$.

We had a few must haves on our list:

•  3 or more bedrooms
•  Shed (a.k.a 'the man cave') big enough to be a workshop for furniture making
•  Must not look like the traditional brick & tile house - you will soon learn that we both like different and sometimes quirky things!
•  Close to the city

We went and looked at a few places which we loved, but at the end of the day we would have blown our budget on buying the house and would have had no money left over to make it ours.  We soon realised that we were going to have to sacrifice something, so we started looking at places a bit further out of the city, which is when we stumbled across our place.  It nearly ticked all the boxes, the only thing was that it was about 20-25 minutes away from the city.

I remember it was late at night when I found the property on the internet, Mr P Man was sound asleep but I was excited to have found a place that was the style we had our hearts set on, so I went and woke him up to show him.  Half asleep and squinting to try and keep his eyes open he had a look.  When I told him it was out of town he didn't seem too keen.  The next morning he woke me up so that I could show him again, he loved it and wanted me to ring up and make a time for us to view it.  I was going away for work, but Mr P Man just couldn't wait, so I arranged for him to go and have a look without me.  He loved it, it was everything and more.  Being a builder, Mr P Man was impressed at how solid and well maintained the place was, with no major works to be done apart from renovating it to our style.

When I got back from being away, we went and had another look and put an offer in on the place that night.  I suppose you can say that we are not one's to hesitate! we usually know what we want and when we find it we don't let it get away from us!  so then it all began, meeting with the finance mob (we had already met with them to understand our situation before looking around at places), organising a building inspector and the biggest job of all - selling our old place!
  
Selling our old place was a mission in itself, we lived at the other end of the state so had to travel up and find the right real estate salesperson.  We knew what we wanted to achieve in our own minds, which some of the real estate agents did not like, so they made our decision easy as we went with someone who believed we could achieve what we wanted.  Interest in our property was slow to start with but then it all seemed to happen at once.  We ended up getting pretty close to the mark of what we were asking for. 

With our property sold and a contract on the new place we started to count down the days until we could move, finally around came January 14th 2011 and we had the keys to our new place.  It was definitely meant to be!  

Below are the pictures of our place off realestate.com.au.

Our place looks like an old shack! Especially with the white & green paint and lattice.  But you have to visualise further than what is in front of you and imagine what you can do with it.



Never take note of the furniture, flooring, window furnishings or paint when looking at a place - this is just cosmetic work which can be changed to your suit your taste for very little effort and money.

The kitchen is very livable which will work well until we are ready for a new one

While the bathroom is the original, it has been well looked after and will serve it's purpose until we are ready to renovate it

This is the main bedroom, it has a door out onto the front deck.  We even get to enjoy water views from our bed!

2nd upstairs bedroom

3rd bedroom - downstairs

4th room downstairs - currently utilised as a second sitting room/ chill out zone.

5th room downstairs - now my craft room !

View from the lounge room

View 2

View from the back of the house - behind the green fence is a massive above ground swimming pool

The man cave

Our new place!

Now that you have the background to the start of this journey, we hope you will enjoy our blogs of inspiration, progress and the dilemma's that can be faced when doing a reno!