bought a house

So, after renting accommodation for close to 20 years, I bought somewhere to live. (Technically, I bought half of a 99 year lease on one part of a multi-unit plan, with another person and a bank.)

It’s a townhouse (in Australia, this is usually a smaller building than a house, with some common areas - like a basement and sometimes shared walls. Unlike apartments, each townhouse is usually multi-storey and each one has some outdoor space on the ground floor.) This one has two living spaces - a reception area at the front and a private space at the back with an open plan kitchen, dining and lounge. This private space opens onto a small outdoor space and a strip of lawn. There are three, modest bedrooms upstairs and a small balcony facing the street. One wall is shared with one neighbour and the other wall faces North (which is preferable to South, in the Southern hemisphere).

It’s not an enormous space, but it is certainly noticeably larger than the two-storey, two bedroom, two bathroom apartment we had been renting. One of the largest differences is that the townhouse has a separate, enclosed garage space (that opens into an underground carpark for the complex), rather than a small cage in a large, almost publicly accessible car park. This opens up great potential for convenient storage and maintenance for bicycles.

The purchase process itself was relatively straightforward, given the number of players (sellers, sellers’ agent, sellers’ solicitor, sellers’ financial institution, land titles office, water rates office, buyers’ solicitor, buyers’ financial institution) and moving pieces (contract, loan and settlement). In many ways, peoples’ efforts to simplify the transaction actually made it more complicated, because everyone had a different form of words, a different calculator and a different ‘thing not to worry too much about’. But, we got there.

It has been great to be moved in (the least said about the move, the better). The furniture that suited an apartment looks odd in the new, larger spaces. There is some trepidation on my part about the furniture upgrades, minor adjustments to the townhouse, garden tasks and DIY projects to come. Some of these will involve trades, like an electrician to change some switch wiring and add some power points, but many will involve committing lots of time to learning new skills (often, the hard way). Similarly, there is a whole host of new appliances to understand, configure and maintain.

There is so much to do and to think about. But our approach is to take our time and to find what works, before we rush into making changes. There is certainly a long list of things that we might like to tweak and features we would like to incorporate over time. For now, though, it’s nice to have our roof over our heads.