February 2008 Archives

Yesterday we moved into the Randwick Lodge which is a 5 minute walk to the school and is also very close to a supermarket and tons of other shops and restaurants. We went from a walk score of 31 in North Balgowlah to a score of 58 here in Randwick. And even more importantly, we are now close to the neighborhoods in which we are looking for flats!

Besides moving, yesterday was pretty uneventful… We got our mobile phone set up, we signed up for a Skype Pro account (we now have a Portland area code number that will ring our computer), and we called on a bunch of apartments. We also went out to dinner at the local Chinese restaurant. The food was yummy, I’m sure we’ll go back.

Today was our first serious apartment hunt day. This whole process is TOTALLY different than in the States, and I already miss “our way” of doing it. Here’s the deal: all rentals (at least as far as I can tell) are handled by real estate offices, and many of them are only shown on Saturday… for 10-20 minutes!! The agent opens the place up and anyone who wants to see it has to show up in that timeframe to walk through it with everyone else. The places we saw today were crammed full of people inspecting the place and filling out applications.

Before we left this morning, we made a list of all the flats we wanted to see, and the times they were being shown so we could walk from place to place to place. After we saw all the apartments, we walked down to a real estate office on Anzac Parade to fill out an application. Here is our 8+ mile walking route… we started at 9:45am and ended at 2:30pm!

As for the apartments we saw… The first place was a wreck, the 2nd one (the one we filled an app out for) was pretty old and had a weird layout, but it was a decent size and it is very close to campus. The third and fourth units we saw were nicer than the first two, but they were too far away from bus lines for daily bus commutes. The fifth and final place we went to, we weren’t actually able to see… The real estate agent brought the wrong keys, so he was unable to open the door to show it to us! Each place we saw had no less than 15 other people there for the inspection, so our prospects seem a little grim for finding a place right away…

When we finally got back to our room at 2:30pm, we chowed down on chips, candy, and Coke before crashing on the bed for an afternoon nap. Since then we’ve just been hanging out in our room recovering from our marathon walk-and-inspect-a-thon.

Tomorrow we’re planning on walking through a few more neighborhoods near the school to see if we should expand our apartment search outward. This doesn’t feel like vacation anymore!

Not much has happened in the last three days, except that we found a flat!! Most of our time lately has been spent searching for places online, sending emails, and inspecting a handful of flats. Yesterday we saw a place along with 10 or more other people, and before we could even get a good look around, someone said “I’ll take it, can I put a deposit down?” That sucked for us, because it made our trip out to the apartment completely pointless! The place was kind of junky anyway and in a shady looking neighborhood, so… sour grapes and all that.

This morning we had an appointment to see an apartment in a newer building that sounded really nice. It was in a neighborhood we hadn’t looked at before (Maroubra) and the location seemed pretty great. There’s a shopping mall about a block away with a few grocery stores and lots of other shops, so it sounded good since we aren’t getting a car. Also, it’s only a 10 minute bus ride to my school and the bus stop is at the end of the block. So, before we even saw the place, we were really hopeful that it might be ‘the one.’

When we arrived at the real estate office at 10:30am, there was another couple also there to see the unit. I decided that if everything looked good after a quick look around, I’d employ the deposit tactic that I saw yesterday to drive our competition away. We rode the elevator up to the 5th floor with the agent and the other couple, and the agent let us into the flat. My first impression of the place was that it was small, but very nice. The kitchen looked new and nice and shockingly it had a refrigerator! None of the places we’d looked at before now has had a refrigerator! The place also had a dishwasher and a clothes washer, so there were three very big plusses going for it. We checked out the bedroom, and it was also pretty small. The bathroom looked very nice, with nice tile work and a fancy counter and sink.

Kara said she really liked it, and I was ok with it so we hurried back to the agent and asked her if we could put a deposit down. She told us that we could head back down to the office to fill out applications and put down a deposit, and that would keep her from showing the unit to any other people until the results of our application came back. So we did just that, but filling out the application took some creative work…

Neither of us have jobs, we haven’t rented from a place since August, and we’re new to the country to boot! So, we spent time slowly filling out the applications, writing on a bunch of other details that they didn’t ask for. Kara said that she’s looking for a job, and will be able to start working in March. She also listed how much monthly income she expects to make. I listed my school as my employer and put down my school loans as ‘income.’ We put down our Hawaii apartment as our current rental details, and then wrote that we moved out in August and have been traveling since. It was all carefully planned out to make us look at least partially stable and responsible. We also (at the agent’s suggestion) wrote on the application that we could pay 2 months of rent up front. When we turned in the application, the agent told us that we should know by tomorrow at the latest.

Less than 4 hours later the agent called and said that we were approved. WOO HOO! We are going back to the real estate office tomorrow at 10:30am to sign the lease and get the keys to our new place! Tomorrow after we sign the lease, we are heading over to Paddy’s place to borrow her air mattress and maybe bring back over a few of our suitcases. We have to take the bus both ways since her car has broken down, so I’m not too sure how much we will be able to bring back with us.

So now our job shifts from finding an apartment to furnishing the found apartment. We have absolutely nothing when it comes to furnishings or housewares, so garage sales and second hand stores, HERE WE COME!

We’re in our flat, but we don’t get internet until the 20th!! So, don’t expect much here until then…

Things are going well, but we don’t have any furniture to speak of. We’re sleeping on Paddy’s air mattress, and we scrounged two hideous sofa chairs and a beat-up coffee table that someone abandoned on the side of the street. New furniture is really expensive here, so we’re hoping to find second hand stuff, but that’s turning out to be a bit difficult since we don’t have internet and we don’t have anyway to transport stuff that we might want to buy…

I want to post pictures of our place as badly as y’all want to see them, but until I can get my laptop on the internet, it ain’t gunna happen. Hang tight.

When I first moved to Hawaii, I made a floorplan imagemap of our new apartment. Well, I decided to do the same for our new Australian flat. But, the next iteration always has to be bigger and better right? So, here's the new and improved floorplan imagemap, now with new features! Act NOW!