We’re currently looking for a new house to rent and live in and after checking out a few options….we’re still back at square one. So welcome to my ‘Rental progress report’ where I’m going to share the sometimes odd, often surprising and sometimes downright strange things we’ve come across in the hunt for a new house.
Possible house to rent #1 – It’s cold but I have to go..
So in our latest ‘Great now we’ve got to find a new place to live’ adventures, I learnt pretty quickly the benefits of showing the people I work with on a day to day basis where we were thinking of checking out. Because in the first case, a couple of co-workers picked out a couple of things that we missed.
Firstly if you wanted to use the toilet, you’d have to walk outside and then turn left because that’s where it was. In it’s own little room in the back of the house.
Which is possibly bearable in normal toilet times on a nice comfy day weather wise. But for me taking a midnight minute at the urinal in the middle of a bitter winter, eh…not so much. An outside dunny is nothing new in this country obviously but I don’t think I’ve seen one in a rental in the 20+ years I’ve been paying off various landlord’s mortgages.
Not to mention that a closer look at the floor plans revealed that to get to bedroom 3, the only access was via bedroom 2. Which would work okay with kids in the toddler stage but we’ve got a 10 year old girl and a 13 year old boy having a punch on with puberty and I couldn’t think of a simpler way to spark up an argument than having to walk through one bedroom to get to the other.
Given that it was very close to the freeway and a truck repair centre with some noise to keep you company through the day, we cancelled that inspection pretty quickly so we wouldn’t waste anyone’s time. Amazingly the real estate company looking after the place are still sending us inspection times just in case we change our mind (or more the point nobody likes an outside toilet.)
Possible house to rent #2 – ‘My caravan had a bigger kitchen!’
House to rent number 2 was literally down the road from where we are now so in my mind I had visions of strapping all the big things we owned to a couple of skateboards and wheeling them over the space of a couple of days. The trouble is though if we took this one one, we’d have to downsize our kitchen by at least 75%.
I kid you not, this house didn’t have a kitchen, it had a broom closet where someone threw in a half sized dishwasher and a stove and probably held their breath while doing it because there wasn’t much room.
As my good pal Heath replied when I sent him the pic: Damn, my caravan had a bigger kitchen!
If you’re used to working in a food van or living by yourself then you might enjoy this tiny ‘cooking room’ but with not much room at all for our go to gadgets like the slow cooker, George Foreman grill and air fryer, let alone not much space at all if two people are working together to whip up something for dinner, this would be a squeeze.
(Also the rent on this place is towards the higher end of the scale, possibly more for the location than the Masterchef training centre broom closet.)
Possible house to rent #3 – Two and a half men. I mean bedrooms.
We’re looking for a 3 bedroom place at the moment, possibly 4 if it’s affordable and somewhere close to the kids schools and work with a little bit of storage space so don’t have to sell everything to start living all over again. Unfortunately the latest house to rent we looked at was closer to 2.5 bedrooms than 3.
Bedroom 1 and 2 were just fine even without any cupboards or wardrobes. 2.5m2 with ducted cooling and some nice carpet, it was lucky bedroom number 3 that scored the extras. And by extras I mean funky carpet and no ducted cooling. Also it was half the size of the other two making it great for a spare mattress and not so great for two kids fighting over who gets the normal bedroom and who gets the hot box.
I also thought the additional of the garage would be a great box ticked as a place to store everything as we slowly unpacked and better yet, store one of our cars when it was empty again. But I’m starting to think it was more original chook shed and farm machine storage than car parking. It would work as storage but get as hot as hell in there pretty quickly..
Possible house to rent #4 – Don’t mind us
‘Oh, are you here for an inspection?’
-The current occupant who was so deep in his game while wearing gaming headphones, he had no idea that seven strangers were walking around the house.
Surely the real estate agent told him they/we/the kids and I were coming round to check out the house to rent?
‘He could have mowed all this before anyone looked at it..‘
-One of the others taking a look. While she wasn’t wrong, I don’t think I spied a mower anywhere. Also I don’t think he cared.
Lovely place, touch too small for us though.
Onto the next one then!
Possible house to rent #5 – The room of interesting smells
Sadly while the house was a little small for our needs, so was the weaving street it was in as we got a park early and then watched 9 other interested parties arrive soon after to attempt to park their car.. somewhere. I know this pales to some of the 2000 strong lines of people I’ve seen waiting in line to pay through the nose for a two bedroom somewhere in the vicinity of Sydney but 9 other interested couples and families is a new one on us and reinforces the fact that we’re not alone in our search.
Interestingly depending on which kid you ask, you get a different answer about what the front room of this house to rent smelt like:
Sophie: ‘Porridge.’
Jackson: ‘Pop corn.’
Wife: ‘Not sure, but it smelt pretty strange..’
That’s a pass then!
(House number 6 looks pretty good so far and ticks many a box but at $130 more per week than what we’re currently paying, my wallet is wincing. Sadly it’s not alone in it’s high price. Still, we applied for it so we’ll see how we go but in the meantime the search continues just in case..)
(I got an email about possible House to rent number 7 last night saying it’s now been occupied. I’d tell you what I liked about it when I inspected it, but I never actually got in there – even though we sent a couple of messages a day after finding out it was time to move.. well okay then.)
Possible house to rent #8 – Just wait outside
It had the bedrooms, it had the space, it had the backyard, it even had a mini workshop and spare room attached that just screamed Al you could do some great YouTube stuff in here!
But it didn’t have any cooling in the bedrooms and it didn’t have a dishwasher. And if the recent spell of hot weather here in an Albury summer have taught us anything, it’s that cooling is everything.
Sigh.
Also this time around there were five interested parties who sat for ten minutes past the inspection time waiting for someone to eventually show up to let us in. Amazingly for someone ten minutes late and a small crowd gathering, there wasn’t a single apology or explanation. ‘There’s a few of you isn’t there?’
Another couple of minutes and we would have given up.
Maybe that’s a ploy to find the ‘true’ renter then? Let’s hope not. Onto the next one!
Possible house to rent #9 – Tinder before picture
Just five dollars more that what we’re paying here and looks over a golf course. What could possibly go wrong here?
Oh boy.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve been Internet dating but back in the day I have fallen prey to the ‘not so great quality snap from years ago used as a profile pic today.’ And this house is the grainy Tinder before pic. Before the house entered a World Wrestling Royal Rumble in position number 1 and somehow lasted all the way to the very end and never took itself to hospital straight after. And yet the pictures look nice and comfy and clean and..
…and we so visited it last second and decided within seconds that oh no, this Fallout special was not for us. Especially when my wife picked up a whiff of something toilet like permeating around the front rooms. It wasn’t rough around the edges, it was rough everywhere.
Look, I’ve rented rougher back in the day. But that day was over 20 years ago, rent was $70 (split between 2), there wasn’t an unwarped non creaky floorboard in the house and I didn’t have kids. A lot has changed since then, so onto the next one!
(Possibly house #10 we checked out a couple of hours after the bomb shelter and it’s looking great so far. Big space, built in the last five years, nice and clean and not a hidden graffiti message in the garage anywhere! Score!)
Finally some good news! Possible house to rent #11…is actually house number 7!
Luck doesn’t smile in my direction often but when she does, boy is it needed. The real estate agent for house number 7 got in contact explaining that the soon to be renters were stuck in an unfortunate situation and couldn’t make it down. Therefore if we wanted to swing by for a look to see what we thought then we were more than welcome to.
Even better, we had pre-approval too so if we liked it, we could sign for it.
Long story short after a bit of a walk through, we took it. At the time of writing we’re busy sorting out a bond, we pick up the keys in a week and move all the big stuff in the very next day. Not only does it have a great looking kitchen with oodles of room to whip up whatever:
But right next to the garage is a great little workshop! I now have a den for my fitness gear and YouTube setup, not to mention tools and of course home brewing!
We’ve got a lot to pack and unpack so I’ll leave things there but rest assured, when I’m in the new house and everything is setup, it’ll be business as usual here at One Man Many Plans.
We found a house though….phew!