Our House

10 Malibu Drive is both more than and less than we had hoped for. Perhaps predictably the Estate Agents’ details weren’t accurate! For a start, ‘small back yard’ should have been translated into ‘no back yard’, unless you count the 6-foot wide strip of gravel/scrubby grass that surrounds three sides of the house under the wrap-around veranda. Now admittedly, you can get a clothes airer under there, which is useful, and because it has solid gates and a good fence this area will be good for Toby to have a nose around, but otherwise it’s almost unusable. Then we come on to bedrooms and bathrooms: ‘Five bedrooms, three with en-suite bathrooms and two further bathrooms’ is an outright lie! There are indeed five rooms that might, optimistically be described as bedrooms, but there are definitely only three ‘bathrooms’ and one of those is a downstairs shower room/utility room with a very dirty shower and toilet… For those of you out there who might at some point be our guest, I can reassure you that although this shower/utility room would be your bathroom, it will soon be a lot cleaner and lovelier!

Room size is also an issue. The main living area is fairly large – certainly as large as the kitchen/dining areas + lounge in our old house in Woodfield Road – just. But the two bedrooms occupied by Patrick and Ella are tiny. Just as well there are built-in wardrobes because all of their furniture apart from beds will have to be located downstairs!
What we’d hoped is that we could have used two of the five bedrooms as an office and a study, making the living area a lap-top free zone (for a change), but I’m not sure how it will work out. Downstairs there is the utility/shower room, a large room with bay windows but no fly screens, and a poky small room with bare plaster walls that will double as a server/box room as it is uninhabitable and gloomy but has all the computer hook-ups in it.

Patrick wanted to have the large downstairs room as his bedroom, but apart from the fact that if he disappeared down there we might never see him again, we need that room as a guest/storage room.

Next in this iniquitous list of deceptions, we have the concept of a ‘workshop’, which turns out to be a small sink, a window and a couple of power sockets at the end of the garage. I had hoped that the word ‘workshop’ signified a separate area with light and power that I might have been able to use for my art, but no… you can barely see in there and there’s no room because it’s inside the garage with the car and the trailer! And the other problem is that our landlords apparently want to use it as a furniture store – something we’ve raised with them, because we are also likely to need to store boxes there once the sea-container arrives.

But the real killer is the last point: when we spoke to the Estate Agents, a couple of months ago, we stated quite clearly that for the purposes of Michael’s work we need to have a good internet connection. Otherwise, how is he going to be able to work? We can’t have the same excellent technology that we had in Bristol (mainly because of the local geography, which is a challenge to pipe-layers up here!), but we needed to be within range of an ADSL Exchange, which would enable him to use a local ISP and have good up/download capacity. We said to the agents that we wouldn’t even look at a house unless we could be specifically assured that we could get an ADSL connection to the house AND that the landlord would be happy for us to do so. Pacific Property went away, consulted the local service providers (or so we thought) and came back with the categorical statement that this house was connectable to the local ADSL Exchange. Only it isn’t. Only we’ve only just found this out because we’ve only just had our telephone connected and can only now test out the line. We can’t even get a 56k modem to work. Aaaaaaaaargh! Naturally I have pointed out to the agents that we have been substantially misled about the house and its facilities, and have been tied into a contract for six months in a house that we may not be able to stay in…

So where does this leave us? Well it leaves us waiting for a visit from a wireless networking ISP guy who is visiting this morning to tell us whether he can hook us up to a wireless transmitter that might solve the problem. If that doesn’t work we shall be taking it up again with Pacific Property, and trying to find ourselves somewhere else to live. Despite my heart sinking at that thought, our life here is only economically sustainable here if Michael can work!

But now for the good stuff, and there is good stuff. The house is full of character because it’s ‘old’, well, old for Australia! I have no real idea of how old, but it’s built in a traditional style with a wrap-around veranda and lovely joinery details. The front and rear of the veranda have carved lattice panels under the gables, and the scrolling design of the gable in-fills is carried through to the interior: all the rooms upstairs have the same lattice in-fills above the doors, which I suppose allows breezes to travel around the rooms, cooling things down in summer. The timber construction and the lattice design are even carried through to a ‘cubby house’ (wendy house) that the owners obviously had built at the same time as the main building. Nestled down the side of the house, this little child’s cabin is just beautiful – although it will need significant cleaning out if Ella is ever to be able to use it!

In the same way that photographs of the interior of the house were slightly misleading, so too were the photographs of the view but in a good way. Looking out of the kitchen window and the rear French windows there are great views of the Pacific Ocean, looking out over Hills Beach and Hawkins Beach (I think!).

We’ve met our landlords, Kerry and Tom, who are very nice. They live in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, and are proposing in due course to use this house as a winter retreat, when the cold of the Blue Mountains gets too much… Looking at Kerry and observing her lack of eyelashes and eyebrows, and her wig, I wonder if she has been treated for cancer – the suggestion is certainly that they are changing the pace of their lives and aiming to relax and enjoy it.