Alan's Rambles: Dunedin: Buying a House

This is a long overdue blog post.

When it became winter we didn't have much to do in the weekends, so we decided to start looking for a new place to rent. It ended with buying a house.

We started with seeing a house which was on 3 floors, accessed by a lift. very weird. The weirdness continued with seeing properties that were not heated correctly, like big places with only one heat pump to apparently heat the whole building. How about no, no it doesn't. not even close.

Nearly everything on the market is rents of which are cold, damp and in need of bulldozing and starting again. So of course we only were looking for something comfortable to live in, AKA double glazing and fully insulated. A heated place was our highest priority.

We also saw a place in outer Outram which was in the middle of nowhere with weird landlords. Also this house was stone cold.

It was becoming obvious that the only option left was to buy something. This, and the fact that no rent was pet friendly.

We started looking to see what the money could get you. some small, others old, and some stupidly designed (who needs a kitchen the size of a conference room, or a place with high ceilings).

We also thought it an idea to build ourselves. There are options out here to do so, with show homes dotted around to give you an idea of what you can build. We couldn't do this in the end because this option is only available for citizens of NZ.

We put an offer in for a home in Mosgiel, which was a nice place, but we were blown away the next weekend with a much larger house that we ended up buying, and this place had radiators in nearly all the rooms.
It was incredible for a build of 2004. The radiator heating is done via coal. It was so very nice coming into a home with radiators! It was a massive home for a decent price. Sabine and I were walking around flabbergasted.
After seeing this place we quickly withdrew our offer on the one in Mosgiel and placed one on this house instead. Its in Abbotsford by the way, on a hill.

After the offer was accepted it was a case of telling our landlords about it and trying to organise a way out of our current contract which was due to end at the end of September.

We started buying furniture after that, buying a bed, a couch, 4 bedside tables and another spare bed for which we have decided to convert the downstairs bedroom into an AirBnB room, for an extra income.

We cleaned the rented house for house inspections, and after a few weeks of people looking around, a young Chinese couple accepted our terms of a move in date at the end of August. Still some ways away at this point.

The move itself was straight forward. We gave ourselves a weeks grace between owning the new house and moving out of the rented place, so 2 weekends to do things in.

On the weekend of the 18th and 19th August we moved most things out and into our new home. We also got Fibre internet installed in the new house. We rented a van and did something like 6 trips using it to move our things.
Also our furniture arrived on the Saturday.

The next weekend was cleaning the rented place and we also had our final inspection from the landlady. She gave us our full deposit back and was thankful for the effort we put in.

Its taken another week or so to feel settled in. I have just stated using the bus service to and from work which is a new thing. I was driving Sabine to work last week and hanging around work in the staff room for a few hours. Sabine likes starting work at the super crazy hour of 6am if possible. She compromised for my sake and was going in for 7am.

Its nice living in a home where I can have easy access to my things which are no longer in boxes. The cats love running around too, so its a better space for them too.