Our new cupboard!

Our storage space is finally ready and now I'm keeping all nuno and stitch products here :-) I got so much stuff for markets to display, so some of them are still in our little study/bedroom, but it looks much better now.

As you know already, our home is very small, but we've got quite a lot of storage. I think this is the key to live neatly in a small space.

As I was organizing this space, I made an inventory and feel a bit more organized. When I sell my products online, it's easy to track of my stock, but when I sell at markets, sometimes I forget to keep records and lose track. The worst nightmare for shop owners might be having no stock when you receive an order..well at least for me, so it's good to know how much stuff I've got. I think I'm stocking too much at the moment, so I might be able to do some stocktake sale soon. Stay tuned!

Now we also started using our cupboard door to record Nico's height. This was Paul's idea originally. At his parents place, one of the doors have heaps of height records for all members of the family (and sometimes friends too!). We wanted to do something similar, but we didn't have the courage to write something on our new doors! Now see what we did. We're using washi tapes. It's easy to peel off, it's colorful, neat and cute! We're looking forward to recording more and more heights for Nico in the future.

Something I learned through our renovation

I am a typical Japanese person. I can't really rock the boat. I'm not good at speaking up at all, but I learned something new through our renovation experience. If you don't say something, you don't get anything! 

For our carpets, we used a local shop. I went there and paid in full before the installation because they said they needed to cut the carpet to the size once I ordered. I didn't argue. 

We booked the carpet installation for Thursday morning and we booked our move in for Friday. I went to our new home Thursday afternoon to do the final cleaning before moving in. I was pretty impressed by the carpet and was happy with the work they'd done, but when I was vacuuming I noticed one part of Nico's bedroom carpet had a big cut. I was a bit panicked! I was sure that the carpet shop would fix it but wasn't sure they could do it before Friday morning. 

I called up our project manager Maria but couldn't get through, so I went to the shop (it was nearly 3 pm) and told them there was a big cut on the carpet and showed them the photo. The shop owner said "ah, that's easy to fix. I'll send someone tomorrow morning" and then I said "Ok! Thanks." After that, Maria called me back after reading my text message and seeing the photo of the carpet. "How do they fix it?" she asked and I said "dunno, but they said it's easy." 

She came to the site and said "I think it's not that easy. They shouldn't just cut one part and join it, they should change the whole thing because you paid for carpet without a join. " Probably the carpet shop took advantage because I didn't know anything about carpet and didn't argue at all. They must have thought it's easy because I'm the EASY one.. 

Maria called up the carpet shop and asked how they would fix it. The carpet shop said they have no more of the same carpet and it's a discontinued item, so there's no way they can change the whole thing. Well maybe that might have been true, but their attitude made us think that they just didn't want to change whole thing. 

Maria and Paul's dad went to the shop and negotiated. In the end, we had to have one join but got $200 back. That was pretty good for us. 

Paul's dad advised me not to pay in full before the job's done from next time. Once they get money, sometimes they can just walk away from this kind of trouble. 

There's one extra story behind this carpet trouble. When Maria was calling up the carpet shop in Nico's new bedroom, I was putting a lampshade in our new bedroom. When Maria finished talking, she went to the lounge to see what her 1year old son Luca was doing and then I heard her scream!! I could tell something really serious happened from her scream. I thought Luca fell down from a ladder or something. 

When I went in the lounge, I saw that Maria and Paul's dad were trying to grab Luca's hand - he was holding a paint brush. And then I saw red paint everywhere on our new white kitchen cupboard - I was painting our front door in red and left the brush near the kitchen. 

Thankfully all the red paint was removed with turps, so now we can laugh about it. We even think we should have taken a photo of Luca doing that. It was definitely the most dramatic and funniest thing that happened throughout our renovation. 


With love, 
Allie 

We've moved!

We finally moved to our new home two weeks ago. We also had our own charity market "Little Keeper's Market" last weekend, so since we moved, we've been very busy, but now we have some time to sort things out around our new home and watch TV after Nico's gone to sleep...

Our linen cupboard isn't ready yet, so all my boxes with nuno and stitch products are in our spare room and there's no space to walk through there. To cut the costs, we asked the cabinet maker to cut all the boards for the shelves into the right size and Paul's dad and his sister are putting them together for us. Also in our lounge area, we have heaps of chairs and it still looks messy. We're making our dining table now so that all my collection of chairs can fit around the table (now we have 80 diameter round dining table and can accommodate only 4 chairs-we have 6 chairs! ).

So I wanted to take a little bit styled photo of our new home to show off to everyone, but all we can show you now is our messy home photo unfortunately:p we will need a little bit more time before we invite our friends over too.

This is our kitchen. The kitchen and the lounge were separated before and each room looked dark, but now with two big windows, it's much lighter! I really love this open space because I can see Nico and Paul playing while I'm cooking.  We love these square subway tiles and black kitchen handles. We love the colour of our bench top.

Nico's enjoying his brekky in our light filled lounge

 

 

 

This is our bathroom/laundry. Our basin is quite small so I'm using the kitchen sink for washing, but I like it because I can see Nico in the lounge while I'm doing the washing too! It's quite a small space, but not over crowded thanks to our designer Maria:-) we love the skylight!

 

Nico's room
This was the room with paint over wallpaper! Now it looks great:-) we love having carpet in bedrooms.

All our renovation went pretty well but we had some dramas just the day before moved in. I will write about it soon!

With love,
Allie

Our renovation updates

Probably some of you might be wondering how our renovation is going, so I'll keep you updated. All the work by our builder has been done, but we're still painting walls and the ceiling. I know it's very slow compared with those renovation TV shows, but this is the reality. Lucky we've got just a small space, but there's still many parts to paint.

I don't know what other people do, but what I learnt from my Aussie family is this.. If you want to do a proper painting job, for each room you need to do wall undercoat cutting-in, rolling, ceiling undercoat cutting-in, rolling, wall first topcoat cutting-in, rolling, ceiling first topcoat cutting-in, rolling, wall second topcoat cutting in, rolling, ceiling second topcoat cutting in, rolling. 12 steps for each room!!! (+ window frame, skirting boards, architraves and doors.)

Paul's parents are away quite a lot this month so one of us always had to stay with our little boy. Paul's sister (aka our project manager) Maria is helping us quite a lot, but she has a little boy too. Every night after our boys have gone to sleep, Maria and I go to the new house and paint...FYI Paul has just started his new job and he's pretty tired from it, so he stays with Nico. We still need to get up in the middle of the night for our toddlers so it's not easy. I used to do some of my work like writing my blog after Nico went to sleep, but I don't have time for that now :-(

Probably we'll be painting over this Easter long weekend. No time for fun. I'm so much looking forward to sitting on the couch and watching TV after dinner at our freshly painted new home!

Allie 

Sweet Home Project -Renovation Week 6

At the start of our renovation project, I wrote that this was going to be a 6 week project. So, did everything finish now? The answer is no!  But we don't blame our builder, because his work has almost finished before week 6. What I found during this project is that there is always some waiting time for other tradies, like the plumber, electrician, tiler etc. . It's difficult for them to come to our place at the exact timing we need them. If we ask for any plumber, any electrician, maybe some one could come I guess, but all builders have preferable or trustworthy tradies to work with and it's better to use them for a successful renovation.

our laundry cabinet in the bathroom

Anyway there are still some things to be done at our place.

Shaft for skylight (builder)
Kitchen doors (cabinet maker)
Laundry cabinet doors (cabinet maker)
Kitchen tiles (tiler)
Kitchen bench top (stonemason)
Floor sanding (floor specialist)
Carpeting (carpet specialist)
Painting (us)
Bath screen (bath screen specialist)

Probably if these people could come at the same time, our renovation would finish in one day even , but there is certain order too, like before floor sanding, we need to paint all the rooms, before carpeting, the floor needs sanding and after floor polishing, we need to leave a week to dry...etc.. We will need to wait 2-3weeks to move.

But actually this is much better than I expected. What I heard or read about renovations in Australia was worse. Like lazy builders who finish work at 2pm, tradies who never show up on the day they promised, inexperienced tradies who ruin everything and takes ages to fix up all the bad jobs... We never had these kinds of trouble. All the tradies who got involved in our renovation project did such wonderful professional jobs so far. I guess we are not just lucky. It's because our project manager Maria is organizing the right people and sometimes making sure they come on the right day.

Nico loves climbing boxes!

Our painting preparation is still going and our friends and family helped us with sanding over the last weekend. My sister even came from Sydney to look after our Nico for us to do some work. But I think she actually just missed her nephew too ;)


The worst nightmare we found at our new place was that the previous owner painted over some wallpaper in one of the bedrooms. Some parts of the wallpaper started to peel off or showed an ugly line, so we had to remove them, but since it's painted it's difficult to remove. Paul's parents, his sister, my sister and me were doing this scraping job in turns last Sunday, but it will take more time to finish this.

With love,
Allie

Sweet Home Project -renovation week 5

So, the bathroom floor and wall tiles are installed. The kitchen cupboards are installed. Now what else?

Week 5 was a bit too hot in Melbourne and our cabinet maker postponed painting the cabinet doors. So we've only got basic cupboard at the moment. They will finish the doors and the laundry cupboard in week 6. They also have the template for the bench top so this will be installed next week or after, and then the kitchen tiles. I heard the bench top takes about 2 weeks after they get the template.

We will get the skylight installed in our dark bathroom too so that's very exciting. Now we've started painting one of the bedrooms!

Well...not quite painting yet. I never expected the preparation for painting to be so hard. Sanding..sanding..sanding! Sore hand, sore neck, sore shoulders. But in a way, I am so glad that I can learn a lot of things from my father in law and sister in law. Before I got married to Paul, I didn't know anyone who could do a handy man's job. All those skills seemed to be passed down in a family, but my parents don't do any of those jobs.. That's quite normal in Japan. 

makeover: bathroom into bedroom

new window is installed and looks lighter!But still the old toilet is there

Now I got this chance to learn about sanding, filling and so on and I'm super excited! We do these painting preparations and painting after Nico goes to sleep on weekdays too. It's not easy after a long day with a 16 month old son and my business but it's all for our future home. I will try my best so that we can move into our new home in two weeks!

With love,
Allie

Sweet Home Project - renovation week 4

Now our bathroom feature door is installed. Yay! I liked the image of a timber bathroom vanity in a white bathroom, but we could easily imagine that it would be damaged by water quickly so we decided to have a timber door instead. I'm hoping that this door will give some warmth to our bathroom.

When we decided to have a sliding door for the bathroom (well, we didn't have any other choice), I instantly thought we need a lock! Because Nico can easily open it when someone is using it. If it's just for us, maybe that's ok (parents never have their privacy) but not for our guests! The builder said it’s impossible to put a lock without making it a cavity slide but for our bathroom size, it was difficult to make a cavity…then Maria worked out how we could do it! We almost gave up having a lock on the bathroom door, but we’re glad that we can have exactly what we wanted.

do you like this way?

 

All the water proof painting was done in the bathroom last week and a tiler came last weekend. On Saturday we had to work it out how we wanted our tile to be lined.. (Sneak peek our 3D tiles!)

 

 

Or this way?
 

We haven't seen the complete work yet, so we are looking forward to seeing it this weekend. Once the tile grout is dry, our cabinet maker will put the laundry cabinet in the bathroom and will also put in the kitchen!!! The finish to this week will be pretty dramatic.

Now we're starting to reach our renovation goal. Before moving in there, we needed to paint all the rooms, so we’re hoping to start painting this weekend. But before that, we need to sell the old kitchen. All the pieces are dismantled and sitting in our bedrooms. We put an ad on gumtree a week ago and got quite a lot of enquiries but haven't sold:-(  Now we’re desperate to sell it before this weekend!! Does anyone want a kitchen for your garage or holiday house?? (
Note: after I wrote this blog, we sold the kitchen!!!)

With love,

Allie

Sweet Home Project - renovation week 3 & renovation budget

Now the walls and plaster around bathroom is installed so we can see how big our bathroom and lounge area will be more clearly. We kept thinking our lounge will be super small but it’s actually not too bad. We really love our new space!

we made a bathroom in our lounge!

This week Maria organised a kitchen maker, air con installer and skylight maker to come and get quotes. It’s starting to be clearer how much we need to pay for this whole renovation. Like most of the other renovations, our renovation is becoming a little bit over budget. Well, to be honest, quite a lot over…because we just keep choosing more expensive options!!!

a bit dark..we definitely need a skyligh!

For example, we decided to use the existing kitchen appliances to keep costs at a minimum but we had to buy a kitchen sink. We didn’t mind a traditional looking one as long as the quality is good, because modern looking sinks are nearly $1000. But we found a very good quality and modern looking, but reasonably priced one for under $500 and we decided to get it. Probably if we stuck to a traditional looking one, we could have saved about $150.

Our sideway door. To get sunlight, we chose a glass door

For the kitchen cupboards, the quote for painting the doors was only $200 more than laminated doors, so we chose paint doors. For kitchen splash back tiles, we had two options we liked, but in the end, we chose the $150 more expensive ones. Each time when we were making decisions, we thought "Well…it’s only $150 difference and we get what we really want. Why not?” and then all of those small decisions made thousands of dollars difference in the end:-(

happy home owners

But still we’re super happy with each of our decisions and hopefully it will all come together nicely. Most of the time, our decision was based on the durability, so we’re hoping that they will last longer than cheaper stuff and we can save money in the end!

with love,
Allie

Sweet Home Project - renovation week 2

All the dramatic things happened in week 1 – pulling down walls and taking away the existing kitchen and bathroom stuff - so week 2 developments somehow looked a bit slow but it was actually progressing where we couldn’t see. The plumber came in so all the pipes for the bathroom (shower/laundry/toilet/basin) are now set. Our new side door was installed. The linen cupboard frame is done too. Our builder was out for another job for a couple of days last week so we’re really happy with what he has done with his limited time. 

 

 

our linen cupboard frame

 

 

 

 

We got almost all the fittings for our bathroom now so we started looking for things for our kitchen. Last weekend, we had to decide on our kitchen benchtop and kitchen wall tiles. Luckily Paul and I have similar taste for these things so we agreed quite easily. (I will show you all our choices when it’s all done!!) 

 

Nico loves visiting this place!!

 

 

For our tiles, we’re using Southern Tile. We just popped in this local showroom in Burwood by accident. Our consultant Marion is very knowledgeable and helpful. They have a huge range, from expensive European tiles to cheap Chinese tiles and we can choose depending on our budget. When we wanted a particular tile that we saw on Pinterest, Marion helped us to find it too.  

 

 

making decision....

 

We visited their Moorabin showroom last weekend and their collection was huge there too. While we were looking at tiles to match our benchtop, they even looked after our little boy ;-)
 

Now week 3 has started and if it’s going according to the original plan, it’s going to be half way soon. We almost finished choosing all the things except for our 3^rd bedroom carpet colour and timber floor colour for the lounge and kitchen, so now we started to be able to picture our future home more. How exciting! 

 

With love,

Allie  

Sweet Home Project - renovation week 1

So our builder thinks he will finish his work in 6 weeks and 1 week has already passed. We went to see our new place over the weekend and we were very impressed! Two walls (the wall between kitchen and lounge and the wall between hallway and original bathroom) were already taken down.
All the fittings in the original bathroom were gone. The original kitchen was removed. One window in the original bathroom was bricked up. I can’t believe that just one guy did so much things in 5 days… Is your builder this efficient? Or just ours?

We’ve been a bit busy getting small things for this renovation. Something like doorknobs, a sliding door lock, laundry taps, and a heating light etc. My mum was very surprised that we have to get these things ourselves because in Japan, the renovation company just brings a catalogue and you choose doorknobs, a colour of the cabinet, wall paper and so on from there. For locks or taps, they just use standard one that the company recommend and probably don’t even ask customers what they want (Probably if you build a house with a big company in Australia, the system might be similar…). It’s good for us to have more choices about what we want and we can also choose the price we like here, but choosing hardware is not that fun compared with choosing kitchen tiles.

For our bathroom, we went to some shops and showrooms and we really like this shop called Swan Street Sales in Richmond. If you’re living in Melbourne and thinking to renovate, we really recommend this place to get fixtures and so on… The staff are all guys, there’s no fancy customer service, but they are so knowledgeable. They do have famous brand sinks, toilets and fixtures, but they don’t really recommend those just because they’re famous.

Even if it’s an unknown brand and quite reasonably priced, if they think it’s really good, they just tell us. When we had to return a mixer because we got a wrong thing, it was very easy and they didn’t show any signs of being put out. When we went to another place to return something, the lady there was very rude!

So far, we’re really enjoying these little processes. These can be a bit stressful for some people, but we just love doing things together.

with love,
Allie

Sweet home project - Renovation

Finally our tenant moved out last Saturday and now we have access to our unit! The builder started his work from Monday and we’re all excited.

Before the renovation started, we wanted to do something there, so we planned an afternoon tea in the empty house. We invited Paul’s parents and sister Maria, but…the tenant came back to clean the unit on Sunday (maybe he couldn’t finish it on Saturday and thought he’d finish before the agent comes on Monday..) so we had to change our plan – we had our afternoon tea at nearby park.

The last 8 months, we went to see this unit from just the outside so many times… a bit like a stalker… So it’s hard to believe that now we can freely go inside and have a look.

Here is our plan for the renovation.

This is the original floor plan.

And this is the new plan which Maria designed.

We’re super lucky that we’ve got a talented sister helping us! She is doing our project management too, so she takes all the stress off from us and we only need to think about fun staff, like which bathroom vanity we want and so on.. Also she helps us to choose those things too. She’s good at finding the right thing for the right spot!

Renovating is fun but it can be stressful when things don’t work as planned. Maria checks the progress and tells us what we need to decide next. I think it’s good for the builder to have a project manager too, because he doesn’t have to wait for the indecisive client’s decision (it’s all organised by the time he needs it) and doesn’t need to worry about other stuff.

It will take about 6 weeks for this renovation so probably we will move into the new place in March or April. We’re very excited, but at the same time, I started to feel a bit sad about moving out this house where we’re living now. It’s only a three minute walk from Paul’s parents place. We had so many memories since we moved in this place - I had contractions here and Nico grew up here! I even started my own business here.

But I’m sure we will have more memories at our new place. It will be our dream home.

with love,

Allie

Sweet home project 6 - how we got our home

So we bought our home in May in 2015. Not in Ringwood or Heathmont, but in Burwood. Yes, Burwood! Much closer to the city as well as Paul's parents place in Mt Waverley. But how did we manage this? I'm going to write about it in this entry.

Stories before this.


Sweet home project 1 - buying an apartment in St Kilda East

Sweet home project 2 - choosing an agent to sell the St Kilda East apartment

Sweet home project 3 - selling an apartment

Sweet home project 4 - endless inspections

Sweet home project 5 - private sales and crazy auctions‏

I didn't mention it so far, but we had a great helper throughout this tough house hunting time. That was Paul's sister, Maria. She has studied architecture at uni and she has her own furniture business. She loves looking at houses, so she couldn't help checking realestate.com.au for us when we started looking for a house. She sent us the links to properties almost everyday! She sometimes came to the inspections with us and even made bids for us at the auctions (we were pretty nervous).

Sometimes she sent us links to 2br units with a new floor plan she designed for 3br. She's very good at this. Then when we found it's almost impossible for us to buy a 3BR house in the Ringwood area, so we started seriously looking at 2BR units, because thanks to Maria we realised that some of them were changeable to 3BR.

We never thought we could afford a property in Burwood, but some of the 2BR units were within our range - unfortunately, they were usually pretty small and almost impossible to change to 3BR.

One day Maria sent us a link to another 2BR unit in Burwood, which seemed to be a pretty decent size, but their asking price was pretty much at our limit (even without the extra percentage added on), so I didn't even look closely.  It was an auction property, so I could just guess it would become more than we could afford.

But a couple of weeks later, I noticed the same property was still on market and it had become a private sale. They didn't sell at the auction. So I thought it might be a good chance. We wanted to see it as soon as possible, but the agent told us it was difficult because of the tenant. So we waited until the next inspection on Saturday....but oh no...we went shopping before the inspection and run out of time. We arrived there 5 mins after the end of the inspection time.

Fortunately, Maria was there too and asked the agent to wait for us, so we could manage to see the inside. We quickly looked around and agreed that we both really liked it. There was the possibility that they might sell it before the next inspection, so we had to make a quick decision. We decided to put in an offer after only a three minute inspection! By that time, we learned a little bit about private sales, so we weren't trying to bargain or anything, we just decided the price that we were happy to pay, but we thought the vendor might ask for a bit more, so we left some room for negotiation.

After putting in an offer, we nervously waited, but pretended like nothing happened. We experienced so many disappointments after being excited, so we didn’t want that feeling again and tried for keep our expectations low. But in the end, the vendor just accepted our first offer and we didn't even have to negotiate or pay extra. Actually, we were told she wanted a bit more, but the agent suggested that she accept it. We never thought the agent would work for us buyers, so we were very surprised but at the same time, very happy. Probably after the auction, the agent wanted to sell it quickly rather than waiting a long time to sell at a higher price.

Three days after we saw the unit, it felt like ours already (although not officially until the settlement). It’s small but really decent, there’s no back yard but we've got some front yard and a sideway. The building itself is very solid. The best thing about the unit is the location. Within a 30 second walk, there's a school, play ground and a cafe. It's not far from public transport and shops too!

how do we change this to 3BR?

Although we haven't moved into that place yet, we're loving the unit more and more since we bought it. Why could we get our perfect place at a good price? Well, we can think of at least a couple of reasons. Firstly, the property had a tenant renting and the contract finishes in late January in 2016, so maybe people who wanted to move in quickly avoided that place. Secondly, our unit is a part of a group of flats so although our place is single story and has its own street frontage, the price was similar to an apartment.

Anyway, we got our home finally. Although we had to wait to move in, this have us time to think about how we want to change the 2BR into 3 BR. We pinned so many images of kitchen, garden, bathroom on our Pinterest board! 7 months of waiting to move in so far has felt very long, but at the same time, quite enjoyable. In a couple of weeks, the renovation at our new place will start. We’re so excited!

This is how we got our home, but I will write about how we're making our dream home in this series too. Stay tuned!



With love,

Allie

Sweet home project 5 -private sales and crazy auctions‏

Stories before this



Sweet home project 1 buying an apartment in St Kilda East


Sweet home project 2 choosing an agent to sell the St Kilda East apartment


Sweet home project3   selling an apartment

Sweet home project 4 – endless inspections



When we were looking for a house around Heathmont, we noticed that “Private Sales” were more popular than "Auctions" in this area. We thought that an "Auction" was like a competition with other buyers and a "Private Sale" was just a negotiation with the vendor, so the latter seemed more peaceful and we thought we might be able to get a good price. But after a couple of trials, we realized that Private Sales are often much trickier than Auctions and that greedy agents (just kidding...kinda) can still use their tactics to get high prices - although when we were selling our apartment, we would have loved a high price!

We came to realise that Private Sales aren't so much a negotiation with the vendor, but a competition of secret (or are they sometimes even imaginative?) competitors. One place we saw was advertised as ‘500K plus’. We knew that the vendor, as a general rule, wanted at least 10% on top of the 500K (which means 550k) so we tried to put in an offer of 560k. When we called up the agent, we didn’t have to say the price on the spot. Instead she asked us to come to the office and put in our "official" offer. Paul finished his work early and we went to the agent together on Monday evening.



The agent told us some people came in to put in offer already and she was expecting a couple more after us. She explained how it works and told us we needed to put deposit of $1000 for the offer. We didn’t bring our check, so she said we could transfer the money that night and if we weren't successful she’d refund our money.

‘So…how much?’ she got into the point. Then we told her our offer was 560k.

Suddenly she changed her attitude a little bit and said “Well if you like, I can wait until tomorrow for you to put the deposit in. You will find out the result tonight.” I could tell that our offer was not good enough for her to bother taking our deposit and refunding it.

In the end, we found out that this house sold for 620K. Since it was a private sale, we couldn’t know what all the other people’s offers were, so the second highest offer could have been 570K and this successful buyer might have paid 50k extra. We'll never know. At an auction, at least you know for sure the second highest bid.

I know at auctions, people can get carried away and pay more than what they can afford, but still there’s the possibility that you can get a good price if there’s no other strong competitors. But for private sales, there’s no second chance, so you have to guess what the other people’s offers are going to be and make up your mind. Not too low but not too high, if you really want to get that place, you have to just put in the maximum offer you can afford.

We went to a funny auction too. This 3BR house in Ringwood was advertised as “430k plus”. By that time, we knew that the theory of 10% plus wasn't really working anymore and that the price would be 15%-20% plus, which we thought meant 495k-516k. When we got there, there were literally hundreds of people. A TV crew were even there, as well as a South American music band – it was almost like a street festival. Although their third bedroom was a bit weird (it looked like they changed the dining space in the kitchen into a bed room) and there were couple of cracks on outside wall bricks, we thought that house was okay if we could get it at a good price, because it had a big backyard. But the bidding price went up quickly over our budget. When it reached 600K, we started to think it’s funny because we thought it wasn't worth anywhere near that much with all those negative parts. In the end, they sold that place at 880K!!! Oh well…we just thought it was crazy.



This was the time we started to think that we wouldn’t be able to afford 3BR house in Ringwood/Heathmont area. We saw so many houses around there and saw same agents many times. After we put in some offers for private sales, agents started to know our "real" budget and somehow we felt like they were thinking we’re losers…



Next time, I will write how we finally found "our place".



With love,

Allie

Sweet home project 4 – endless inspections

Stories before this


Sweet home project 1 buying an apartment in St Kilda East


Sweet home project 2 choosing an agent to sell the St Kilda East apartment


Sweet home project3   selling an apartment


Paul and I got married in November in 2012. Ever since then, we kind of started to look for a house. I grew up in a two-storey town house with a small backyard, front yard and sideway in Tokyo. My otousan (dad) looked after the garden but it looked like a chaos, at least for me, and I knew I’m not good at looking after plants anyway (I just don’t bother water them and then they die soon…poor things!) So I felt that if we couldn't afford a house, I was okay with an apartment. But for Paul, the idea of a "dream house" was a place with a decent size of yard. He grew up in a big house with a big backyard (typical Aussie home!) and his parents have lovely vegie patch and their garden always looks neat.


Well, I definitely didn't hate the idea of living in a house, as long as we can afford it, so we kind of decided that we want a 3BR house. It’s good to have 3 bed rooms because we might have 2 kids in the future. Even if we don’t, it’s good to have an extra room for guests from Japan (especially my mum.) We were pretty happy with our St Kilda East apartment before we had Nico, so we weren’t that serious about trying to find a place quickly. We just occasionally checked realestate.com.au and when there was something interesting, we went to the inspection for fun.


We thought it’s nice to live close to Paul’s family in Mount Waverley, but Mount Waverley was becoming one of the most expensive suburbs because of the high-ranked public school. Then we found this area called Clarinda (near Clayton) which is about 15 mins by drive from Mount Waverley and where the houses were still affordable. In 2012-2013, a 3BR house in a big block of land was around 500k there. Because of the land size, we thought we could build one more house in the backyard and sell or share the land with a friend or someone from Paul's family and build two new units. We weren’t ready to buy yet, but we went to a couple of auctions too. We saw at least 15 houses around this area over around 6 months. During that time, while we weren't that serious, the prices went up so quickly and we started to doubt if we could afford a house in Clarinda. That was the time we found our little Nico was in my tummy.


Then, as I wrote in Sweet home project 2, we decided to sell our apartment first and rent from Paul’s parents temporarily while we were getting ready to welcome our baby.


Once we started to settle in our new life with Nico, we started looking for our house again. Our first inspection after Nico was born was when he was 2 months old and my mum was there. Paul found a new area called Heathmont near Ringwood which was still affordable at the end of 2014. That suburb was a bit farther from the City and Paul’s work, but it’s still 15 mins drive from Mt Waverley and quite handy with express trains from Ringwood and a big shopping centre nearby.

inspections with little Nico

The first house we saw there was a lovely mid-century style house with a big backyard. The inside of the house was very very old, but it had some potential. It had a big front yard too, but they were selling the front yard separately and we couldn't know what kind of house would be built there.


My mum went to the inspection with us and I could tell that she was a bit shocked by how old the house was and how rubbishy it looked. By that time I had gotten used to looking these old houses in Australia and when I inspected them, I didn’t think about living there unchanged and was really just looking at the parts we couldn't change, like the structure of the house or location. But my poor mum, she didn’t really understand - in Japan, when people get married, they usually buy land and build a new home. Usually they'll never sell it and will continue to live in one "family house" for a long time. Once they pass away, their kids live in the house. (These days, many people buy a high rise apartment though!)


Looking around at houses with a newborn baby wasn’t easy. He was often sleeping in the car and one of us had to stay in the car with him. I often had to make formula in a moving car and try to cool it down while Nico was crying so hard. We sometimes had to change his dirty nappy in our car or on the nature strip too! We went to Heathmont almost every weekend and had 2 or 3 inspections each time. It was quite tiring.


Well this is becoming a long story (and felt long for us at the time), so I will share some interesting stories about inspections and auctions next time.


With love,


Allie

Sweet home project 3 – selling an apartment‏

 

 

In the story of Sweet home project 2, I wrote about how we chose the agent to sell our St Kilda East apartment.

 

Sweet home project 1

Sweet home project 2

 

So now we got an agent…what’s next?

 

The agent told us that the photographer would come and take photos of our apartment, but we still had some time. We had large, lovely wooden frame windows in the lounge and bedroom and that was the great feature, so we decided to sand and oil them to make them look nicer. They had started to get a little bit old and stained over the years.

 

Paul’s parents came to help us. They also helped with a couple of other parts, like fixing up a rotten kitchen window frame and painting the communal corridor wall and our front door, of which some parts were peeled off. They even cleaned the windows from outside (our apartment was 2^ndfloor, so it wasn’t easy!!!)

 

Also Paul’s sister Maria came to the apartment and gave us some good advice about the interior (she does this for her work.. SEE here! ). We moved our furniture so that the room would look bigger. We even took out some of our stuff to Paul’s parents’ place temporarily. Living in a showroom-like home was sometimes inconvenient, but it was only for a couple of months, so we decided to do that.

 

We had inspections on both Saturday and Sunday, because St Kilda East has a large number of Jewish people, who may prefer Sunday inspections. The first Saturday inspection was a bit of fun for us - we were a bit excited to leave home and have a cup of coffee at neighbourhood café. But soon it became a bit annoying. We had to wake up early every weekend and keep our home tidy. Besides this, not many people were coming through. On the first weekend we had 5 groups and on the second weekend, 3 groups came. And the condition of our apartment was really good! A sparkling kitchen with marble benchtop, light-filled lounge, beautiful carpets (we didn’t wear shoes at home), close to station and shops, secure small block apartment, top floor...you name it, we had everything! Haha, maybe I sounds like I'm still trying to "sell" it, but we just didn’t understand why people weren’t coming.  Maybe the timing wasn’t that good, but we couldn’t wait until spring because we wouldn’t be able to move out just before my due date.

When we started worry that we might not sell at the auction, the agent told us that there was one person who was pretty keen to buy our apartment. She was a young girl who had some financial support from her parents and she really liked how we lived in the apartment. She even liked all our furniture!  The agent said she wanted to put in an offer before the auction, but if we didn't make a decision quickly she’d go to the other auction next weekend. Is that a tactic for buyers that make vendor feel nervous about that they’d not come back to buy at the auction? We weren't not sure, but the agent said this was a pretty good opportunity, especially since we weren't getting many people interested.

 

We were ready to accept an offer, but hers was a bit low. We were trying not to be greedy, but at least we wanted to get a similar price to what I paid 4 years ago. The agent understood our situation and tried his best - in the end, he got the price which was a bit better than we expected (it wasn’t as good as we first planned though!). The price was actually a couple of thousand dollars lower than the price I bought it for, but over those 4 years I also didn’t have to pay rent to someone else, so in the end we thought it was alright.

 

So we sold our little 1BR apartment in May in 2014 and moved out in July, which was 3 months before my due date. We were very emotional about moving out of our favourite place, but we got a lovely 3 BR and study house to rent from Paul’s parents and were excited about getting a room ready for little Nico, so it wasn’t too bad.

 

We really loved living in St Kilda East. Whenever Paul explained to someone we lived in St Kilda, I was a little upset because St Kilda East is completely different from what you imagine from just “St Kilda”. We really loved the little shops on Carlisle Street, including a great Jewish Bagel shop and a funny, old fashioned video shop with a huge selection. We also really loved the old beautiful building of St Mary’s church and hearing the bell from our apartment. When we get old and if we want to downsize our home, we might go back to this our favourite area again ;-)

Next time, I will write about how we got our new place!

 

With love,

Sweet home project 2 – selling an apartment (choosing an agent)

In the story of Sweet home project 1, I wrote about how I bought my old St Kilda East apartment. Today I will write about how we sold it. 

When I bought it, I didn’t expect to have to sell it so soon (I was there for less than 5 years!) so I was a bit sad, but I knew that was for something more positive. We really needed extra space for our little baby. We didn’t know anything about selling our apartment, so we just popped in one of the nearest real estate agent (let’s say agent A) and asked. We didn’t have an appointment or anything, but the guy there just made time for us anyway (it was 5 mins before 5pm-just before they were closing) and he told us that he would come to our apartment to have a look the next morning.

 He came to our apartment with his assistant next day. He prepared a nice looking booklet which had all the information about the selling history from our apartment and neighborhood. We didn’t have any experience with an agent, so we were very impressed. One disappointing thing was that he estimated our apartment a bit cheaper than we expected, but we thought he’s being honest. He was not pushy and that made us comfortable. He just left us to decide what we want to do. We really liked that approach. 

We nearly decided to use this agent A, but just in case, we went to see another agent (agent B), one that looked pretty popular in the area and located right next to the station. They came to our apartment soon after we contacted them.   

 

They brought a booklet similar to the agent A, so we found that this was the standard these days. As soon as they came in, they spotted the good parts of our apartment and looked impressed. They were a bit younger than the agent A and more “salesman” types of people, but looked enthusiastic. The fee was cheaper than agent A and estimated our place a bit higher. They wanted to get this business, so they even offered the lower fee. 

If you were in this situation, which agent would you choose? Agent A still looked genuine to us and I thought Paul was leaning toward it. But for me, the fact that the agent B really liked our apartment was quite big. It’s our favourite place and I wanted to tell all the potential buyers how wonderful that place was, but we couldn't be there at the inspections, so the agent had to be our representative. 

Agent A was nice and kind, but he didn’t really try to sell themselves to us - I wondered "How can they sell our place to someone else?"

We wanted to sell our apartment before winter (we thought that less buyers would be around in the cold weather!), so we decided to attend their auctions on the weekend and make the final decision...but unfortunately two agents’ auctions were scheduled on the same time. Paul knew that I was leaning toward the agent B, so he suggested that we’d go to the agent B auction and we asked Paul’s parents to go to the other auction. 

 In the end, we chose the agent B. At the auction, we’re impressed by how they handled all the potential buyers. They had many staff there and during the auction, they were all attentive. At the end they succeeded in getting a bit higher bid from the second highest bidder, so therefore they pushed the price up. 

 

 At the auction that Paul’s parents went, agent A couldn’t sell the place. Paul’s parents were a bit surprised that the agent didn’t talk to them at all (and didn’t even ask their contact.) Maybe the agent thought they were just neighbours, but still they could be potential buyers. 

It was pretty easy decision in the end. So we picked the agent. What’s next? I will write about how we sold the apartment next time!

 

With love ,

Allie