9) Spoon Bay Road

The house that Margaret showed us was not as big as it looked from the outside. In fact the property was actually two dwellings. There is a one bedroomed unit on the ground floor and a two bedroomed unit on the second floor. (There is another Australian word – I would have called them flats but the Australians say units.) I think Jonny and I were impressed with the place as soon as we went up the stairs to the front veranda and saw the lovely view. From there we could see out over the Wamberal lagoon and across the Tumbi Valley to the hills in the distance. On the other side of the lagoon is the Wamberal cemetery but we were not worried about that as we were sure they would be quiet neighbours.

Inside the house there are two bedrooms, a shower room, a lounge, a dinning room. a small kitchen and a nice large sunny room at the rear that Margaret called the “Family Room”. Downstairs there is a laundry, a storage room, a shed and a large carport that we have access to. There is also the small one bedroomed unit and an out building that has a spa bath and a sauna which is for the sole use of the owner and we do not have access to these. Margaret told us that the owner of the house used the unit as a holiday cottage and that he had only spent about 13 days there during the previous year so we need not worry that he would be there the whole time. Most of the time we would have our privacy and not be disturbed by anyone.

Once we agreed to rent the house the paper work had to begin. (Australians are always over burdened with paperwork) We went back to Margaret’s office and started filling in the forms. There were two things that were against us, we had no credit ratings or reference in Australia and we did not have a regular income but there were things in our favour too. We did not have young children or pets, we did not smoke and did not have any criminal records and just by looking at us Margaret could see that we were unlikely to hold wild parties in the house. She did tell us that the credit ratings and references could be a problem but that she would put our application to the owner and see what he had to say. She rang us the next day to tell us that the owner was prepared to rent his house to us and could we come and pay our bond. This caused us a bit of confusion at first as to us, coming from South Africa a bond was what we called the loan one got when buying a house but Australians call that a mortgage. To them a bond is the deposit one pays to ensure that the owner is covered for any damage that the tenant might do to his property. Once we had clarified that the house was for rent and not for sale and everyone understood what everyone else meant we paid our ‘bond’ Margaret then told us that there had been a few other people interested in the house and we had got in just in time. We arranged to take occupancy about ten days later on January 18th to give us time to get the phone and the electricity transferred into our names. Having done these transaction many times in our married life I found that it is much simpler in Australia. It was all done over the phone, quickly and with the minimum of fuss.

As our furniture had not arrived from South Africa we did not have a great deal to move into our new home. Dominic arranged to borrow a trailer from one of his friends from church so that we could move in on the appointed day.