Moving House in Australia

I am so excited. We are so excited; me, Mrs Bob and Elizabeth. After nine years of living in the same house, the house we purchased without ever having stepped foot in it, we are moving. It’s a house we have a lot of affection for, one that will be especially remembered as the house we bought online from the comfort of our office chairs, as we sat in front of our computer screens in England.

It’s a house we have grown to love more and more over the last nine years…

But for us, it’s now time to move.

We decided we wanted to move because, as much as we do love our house, there were certain things we wanted that it could not give us. Higher ceilings, more light, a bigger kitchen, better layout and easier garden maintenance.

Moving house in Australia works very differently from in the UK. Here’s a brief outline of what has happened so far. What is refreshing about buying a house in Australia is how quickly it can be secured.

We spent about three months looking at houses, and then finally decided to bid on one after viewing it on Wednesday 9 November. That bid went in at 6 PM the next day and a deal was finally verbally agreed on Saturday, 19 November while we were enjoying A Weekend Break on the Gold Coast. On Monday evening two days later, the real estate agent came round and me and Mrs Bob signed some documentation.

The agent then went round to the sellers house and they also signed it. By 7 o’clock that evening I received a text message from the agent saying the deal was done. This is a legal document, only we are allowed to back out subject to the building and pest inspections and we have 10 days in which to complete that. The seller cannot change their minds and we cannot be gazumped.

I will be meeting the building inspector at the property this coming Monday in the afternoon.

So just 11 days after making the first bid and without even actually seeing a solicitor, the deal was done. We have signed a 90 day contract instead of the usual 42 by mutual agreement, because the seller has not yet found a new house to move into and we’ve not sold our house yet either.

So our expected moving in day has already been set at the 20 February 2017.

Not only have we not sold our house, but we haven’t even put it on the market!

We have about one or two weeks worth of work to do on our place before we can put it up for sale, you know the sort of thing, decluttering, tidying and a bit of decorating here and there. So the blog part of my website will be going quiet for a while as I have work to do.

New for 2017

I decided a couple of months ago that next year I would blog less frequently. Currently I add three new blog posts a week; that will now change. I’m going to put more emphasis on updating and adding new pages on the website rather than writing about Australian day-to-day life. I will continue to add blog posts on some of the major moving to Australia issues, but just once or twice a month.

So there’ll be no post on Monday about what I did at the weekend, which is great news for you. After all, who wants to read about somebody decorating a house or packing trinkets into cardboard boxes?

No more Friday afternoon videos either, like this one about moving house, Aussie style…

No, that’s not exactly how we will be moving, but that sort of thing does happen in Australia. Our move is the more traditional kind. We are selling a house that is firmly attached to the floor and moving to another completely different house which, we hope, is also firmly attached to the floor.

We now have 90 days in which to sell our house or else.

And we all know what the ‘or else’ is, don’t we?

Yes, a massive loan. Yikes!

An update coming……. sometime soon.