Ooh...yeah...sexy...

I am writing this in the small window of wakefulness between when I wake up and when my next emergency antihistimine kicks in. They make me so tired. I slept all of Tuesday away.

Sunday was Taya's birthday party and we had a fun barbeque and mad scientist show. I'll post up pics later. I brought my own little gluten-free snags that were pretty tasty. I had filled up on chips and lollies so I only had one.

After the party I felt pretty ill--headache, nausea, red face and chest etc. I figured I had heat exhaustion or something, so drank a lot of water and took it easy in front of the aircon.

On Monday I still had a headache. I cooked myself two leftover sausages for breakfast, and a few hours later I had two more for lunch.

By the time Chris got home my headache was bad enough for me to have checked the label on the sausages. They contained sulfites, which I'm deathly allergic to. In the US they aren't allowed to be used in meat products so I didn't even think to check before I ate them. Now I know I've got another banned food.

I've written about an attack before so you can read the details there.

To sum up, Chris took me to the hospital at 11pm on Monday night. I got my shots and stayed until 4am for observation. Chris brought me home and I have only been waking up to take more medicine. As you can see in the above photo, my face is still pretty puffy. I hope I feel better tomorrow but for now I have to sleep because it is drowsy time...

November is over already? I will immortalize the month's occurrences with haiku.

Australian Tax
Office investigates us.
An audit? Oh NO!
Date: All month long and into the next.

We had ongoing problems with our old accountant. We gave up and hired new ones. The day they registered as our tax agents the ATO informed them the SGC would be audited. The Australian Tax Office tried to question our old accountant for a while but never heard back from her, so were quite pleased when new contacts popped up on our register. Sigh...

Our new accountants, Abacus Accounting, have handled this surprise workload really well. They are amazingly patient and efficient with our knotted account history. They are so damn on the ball! They find problems, tell us how to fix them, and communicate with us every step of the way and answer questions before we even ask them.

I wrote a more detailed explanation but Chris vetoed it being public, so I will sum up: in the last few years of accountancy problems some things fell through the cracks.

Coming from America I fear the dreaded A-word but it hasn't been bad so far, which is entirely because we are getting excellent service from the good people at Abacus. I've spent a lot of time sorting and chasing old records to get them the data they need and our old accountant provides information to them a lot more quickly than she ever did to us. I can't wait til this is all sorted and we know whatever outstanding things and fines we need to pay so we can clear them. The unknown "there is an undetermined amount of owed payments, interest, and possibly fines" is just a tiny bit terrifying.

WoW Event in Melbourne.
Did not wow me. So boring.
Okay turnout though.
Date: 13-16 November.

Chris was running an important World of Warcraft event in Melbourne and brought me along to help. The turnout was pretty low though, and store staff Russell and Edmund with organizer Chris and judge Nathan were more than capable of handling the crowd of less than 30 people. I was stuck in that terrible extra staff limbo: unable to leave in case something came up, but unable to work because there was nothing much to do. That weekend the temperature in Melbourne was 40 degrees C and the event was in a windowless room with no air conditioning. It was more hell than limbo...

A bright spot was seeing Pokemon peeps Zoe, Marcus and Todd but was unable to really chat with them much because I was there on the Upper Deck dime. I passed my stultifying result-entry hours reading The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, which was amazing. It spans multiple decades and mixes history with fiction and fictional fiction. I devoured it and even spent Saturday night in the hotel reading instead of hanging out in my favourite Australian city. I also read Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving which wasn't as good as John Irving's other novels (A Prayer for Owen Meany, The World According to Garp) and was especially lackluster after reading The Lacuna.

On the Friday, we had lunch in Federation Square and watched people set up for the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards which were scheduled for later that night. We were in a place where celebrities would be later!!

Celebrities like "Miranda Cosgrove: from some Nick show" and "Guy Sebastian: he won Australian Idol a long time ago".

The highlight was not staggering up Elizabeth Street Sunday morning under the weight of WoW Prizes--3 Playstation 3s. The highlight was foiling the attempted Playstation-snatching by some drunk English backpacker with the help of friendly Melbournian passerby. They chased him down while I clutched my trove of treasure, and escorted me to a safe cafe where I could wait for load-bearing reinforcements. They even bought me a coffee, which I promptly dropped all over my shoes whilst attempting to juggle it and the Playstations.

Foggin Family Time:
Time with Bob and Monica,
Mel and Andy too!
Date: 26 November, 29 November, and a few random nights.

As a former tax agent Bob has been intensely interested in our ongoing audit and has been dropping by for updates and tea once a week or so. I suspect Monica does not find the minutia quite as fascinating as Bob does.

Andy's 29th birthday was the 26th so we chauffeured a very posh looking Bob and Monica down to Wagamama on King Street Wharf for a delicious dinner and good chats with Andy and Michelle and a few of their friends. Chris and I felt very slovenly in the sweaty clothes we'd run errands in all day because Monica looked especially dazzling in an aqua dress with a very flash brooch. Bob was even wearing a sophisticated (according to him) yellow tie with banjos on it. It was good to see Andy and Michelle--it had been ages.

Yesterday we dropped by Mel and Doc's new house to pick up some empty boxes for our own packing. Their house is pretty fucking sweet. It has an orchard out the back and amazing landscaping in the front and a relaxing back verandah I covet with every fiber of my being. River and Cooper were adorable and impish as usual. Good times!

With the boxes Mel gave us I managed to finish packing every superfluous thing we won't be needing for the next few weeks. YES I AM SO EFFICIENT!! Next weekend we're dismantling all the unused furniture...the weekend after we're cleaning...the weekend after that we are packing up the last of the house and tidying the yard...and then we move on the 22nd! I am excited!

The unpacking will be a much speedier affair because we are hosting Christmas 3 days later. Ay dios mio!

It is 4:30 on the Friday of a whirlwind week of paperwork and I am going to call it quits and start my weekend early.

For work, the database used to sanction and manage Pokemon events has been down for about a month. That meant that nearly everything I needed to do was on hold. At midweek, all systems were basically go and I've been playing catch up, trying to get the old events into the database and cleared back out before bringing in a new lot.

For the house sale I've been coordinating the stream of data between our real estate agent, our solicitor, and the solicitor and real estate agent of the buyers. After a week of discussing proposed contract changes, we went to our solicitor's and signed the contract yesterday.

For the house purchase we've been trying to coordinate our move-in date to be the same as our move-out date, and I've been doing my due dilligence and trawling through the Blue Mountains City Council website and information line so I'd understand all the zoning restrictions on our new property before our cooling off period ended.

The new house is surrounded by forest and it is also surrounded by environmental protection laws. Luckily I am a hippie and heartily approve of green tape of this sort. A summary of our lot's zoning:
Purpose: Living
Restrictions:
Bushland Conservation
Environmental Protection
Protected Area: Ecological Buffer Area:
Protected Area: Vegetation Constraint Area
Protected Area: Slope Constraint Area

For our home loan I have been finding and faxing volumes of information for our lender and signing all kinds of documents that probably call for the blood of my first born child.

And, we've also been dealing with the fallout from our ongoing accounting problems. Nicole hadn't sent our things to our new accountant despite repeated requests since 5 October. That was really inconveniencing us, so yesterday we just appeared in her office and demanded she box everything up. She made excuses for her lack of work by saying she'd been waiting on us to do things that we'd done in July or earlier and said it was a "bad decision" for us to move to another accountant and entreated Chris to leave things with her a bit longer because she was "nearly done" and I became infuriated and called her out for her history of idle promises in front of her staff. Just thinking about it makes me angry so I am not going to recount it. We took the box and left without any kind words. Last time I saw those records they were fairly organized but they were in an unorganized jumble and missing things and mixed up willy-nilly with records for someone else's business (so unprofessional!) but at least it is a start.

Anyway, I am sick of it all and I don't want to look at a photocopier or manila file folder ever again!

I've hit four op shops in the past week!

On our way back from the New House Photoshoot we stopped at the Lawson Vinnie's, where everything was $1 because the entire strip of shops in Lawson is scheduled for demolition to make way for progress in the form of a 4-lane highway. There are a lot of heartfelt and heartbreaking signs that say "save Old Lawson shops!" but most of the storefronts are empty and the rest are clearing their stock.

I picked up some very nice things that some nana had decided she could live without. A cute scarf with sailboats on it, two skirts, and a terrible early 90's jumper (I mean jumper in the American--like stretchy cotton overalls with a skirt instead of pants.) I am going to chop the top and make a skirt out of it. That tea towel was twenty cents! We will use it for tidying up and triggering memories of the days when we lived in the Big Smoke.


A few minutes down the mountain we saw huge signs advertising St. Finbar's Fete so we stopped in for some small town festival festivities. One sausage sizzle and raffle later, we stopped into the trash and treasure room to buy Chris a pair of $100 sunnies secondhand for $2 and a neat sweater set which I will never wear congruently. Anabel does not think much of them. She says..."Meh".


Nearly home, we were suckered in by a garage sale sign. I bought a beautiful plant encyclopedia called "Flora" put out by Gardening Australia. It was $5 when a brand new one is like $100! I was stoked! When I got home I realised that it was only part two of a two-volume edition. I have L-Z and someone else has A-K. Noooooo! If any one ever comes across a lonely Gardening Australia's "Flora" Volume 1: A-K please buy it for me and I'll pay you back. It's bound to be somewhere in Sydney!

Today we had to go into our Auburn bank and found that a Vinnie's had opened up right next door! Of course we had to look at it quickly on the "way back to the car". It is a treasure trove of cool stuff that the denizens of Auburn aren't interested in...but hasn't been picked over by hipsters because it is NEW and undiscovered! We didn't have time for more than a quick sticky beak but I plan to go back this weekend and go through the racks.

Check out this awesome condiment set! I bought it and gave it a home.


We also got a cushion with a cute 'cowboys and indians' motif which goes well with the tea-towel tourism cushions I just made:


I grabbed another plant encyclopedia. This one is not as nice as the Flora one above, but at least it is complete! I also picked up a book of 70's "easy designer clothes" patterns solely for a cool double-sided skirt. Sadly, I have no need for a poncho or culottes so the rest of the book will go unused.

The art in this Vinnie's included sad-eyed stylized dogs from the 70s AND photos of people dressed up like hip-hop jesters from the early 90s. Oh god it was a temple to terrible art.


$3! I wanted to buy this so badly but Chris argued that we were proper grown ups with a mortgage and tasteful tastes, not ironic hipsters living in an overpriced garret.

I still think "stuck on you" koala would have made a good gift for some recently married Yanks I know. Which is not to say that they are ironic hipsters living in an overpriced garret. It is just to say they would appreciate the badness of the art.

I'm reading a book that was published 113 years ago in 1896. I picked it up for free--someone had donated it to BookCrossing, a book exchange program.

The book is "The Little Larrikin" by Ethel Turner. According to her, "Larr'kin...is a new word which to-day is understanded of the people throughout all Australia, and its interpretation is 'one who just larks about,' heedless of whether his larking disturbs his graver-minded fellow citizens or not. He is the foe of all policemen, Chinamen, and dumb animals."


The story so far concerns a family of orphan boys and centres on the youngest, a six-year-old named "Lol", which is short for Lawrence.

Reading it is a challenge. Firstly, it is written in the English of 1896.

Secondly it is written in the AUSTRALIAN English of 1896.

Thirdly, the larrikin's voice is written in a 'cor blimey' slang when amongst his "push" which I am assuming is a gang of boys. Fourthly, he is looked after by a girl "whose speech was peculiar, owing to a growth of some kind in her throat. Occasionally she had the impediment removed , and then she was more intelligible, but when it increased again her words bristled with strange, misplaced or struggling letters...there was absolutely no method or attempt at consistency in the letters she could not say."

"Gid out wit gers; how tan I wadge up te ditches wit shu in te titchen?" she said.
I had figured out the last bit, but the first was a mystery until I consulted with Chris.

It's "Get out with you (yars); how can I wash up the dishes with you in the kitchen?".

Ohhhhh!

Recently introduced was Miss Linley Middleton. She "had been snatching a breath of mountain air for complexion roses that a gay season was killing...she was to have stayed at Katoomba the rest of the winter you know--the doctor said so--"

Now, when people ask me why we're moving to Katoomba I am going to say "I am snatching a breath of mountain air for complexion roses that a gay season was killing". It is LITERARY.

I'm only on page 32 and I have scintillating chapters like "Concerning the Jenkinses' Dog" and "The Setting Out of Ruffy" ahead of me. Goodness!

For politeness, the bulk of the photos are behind the cut, but I don't know how that cut will translate over on Facebook!


( Read more... )

Friday Keroppi went in for his yearly roadworthiness checkup and a general tune-up. He checked out okay and we breathed a sigh of relief.

Chris has a tendency to obliviously drive through automotive problems. In 2005, he drove Jolene our 1976 Valiant Station wagon over mountains in 40 C weather in spite of panicked temperature gauge and rusty steam billowing out of bonnet to splatter against the windscreen. Result, overheating, complete radiator and hose replacement and eventual replacement of the car because "she just hasn't been the same since". In 2007 he pushed Yoshi the 1992 Mazda 121 on to Gosford by "driving through" extreme overheating. Drive til it dies, and as soon as it starts, drive it again (without adding water) until it dies again...result, replacement of entire engine, which cost more than the car.

So, it isn't surprising that he drove Keroppi to work and back and only vaguely noticed that something wasn't quite right when he saw the look of horror on my face when he pulled my smokey-engined rattletrap of a car into our driveway.

"Oh my god, Chris, how could you keep driving it? Is it overheating? HAVEN'T YOU LEARNED?

Once it cooled down I popped the hood and checked the oil and water, which is about the extent of my mechanical abilities. "Something is wrong. We should take it straight back to the garage."

"No, she'll be right".

There are times when the no worries mentality of Australians drives me mad.

"We have two cars! We can drop this one off and take the other one to D&D!" I said.

"I don't like the other one!" Chris argued.

Since he's the driver he picks the car so we headed off to Neil and Coz's house in Padstow. 3/4 of the way there the temp gauge was maxed out and the burning chemical smell coming off the engine block was making me wheeze.

"We should *cough* call *puff* the NRMA!" I wheezed.

"It's FINE. We're almost there." Chris drove on.

I turned off the aircon and adjusted the fan to pull hot air off the engine. It cooled marginally.

"See, it's cooled right down. It's just a hot day!" Chris gloated.

The car, with excellent comic timing, died. We were stopped at the light just before Padstow. So close, yet so far.

A few keycranks and horrible grinding sounds later, the car started and Chris nursed it along for about 5 minutes until we reached Neil and Coz's.

"That rattling sound is back" I noted helpfully.

We called the NRMA but they arrived so quickly that the car was too hot to touch! We rang them again a few hours later and discovered myriad problems caused by a busted thermostat. It was locked shut, trapping water in the engine, which made it overheat. When the head of steam got to be too much, things fell to pieces. The intake valve split. The gasket blew. A bolt was blown out of the engine block. When the NRMA guy added water, it leaked from the engine in tremendous spurts. Oh dear.

The NRMA repairman tried to get Keroppi to a drivable state but no luck. We had to have the poor little guy towed back to Auburn. He's at the garage now and we're picking him up on Monday.

I am starting to feel all nesty about my new house in the mountains, and reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver has had me daydreaming about growing my own veg in a yard shady enough for me to venture into during the summer months.

The Lifestyle Channel owns my leisure time generally but I tend to be more interested in shows like "Relocation Relocation" when I am relocating myself. The girl that hosts that show has a new show called Kirstie's Homemade Home and I watched it tonight while Chrissy slept snottily on the sofa. (He's sick at the moment and very pathetic).

Anyway, if you click that link above you can see the episode I watched today, about making cushions. When I heard the subject I thought: "I have a couple of tourist tea towels that I bought over a year ago that I intended to make into cushions!"

When Kirstie whipped out the red cotton to cover her cushion I thought: "I have some red cotton like that, a whole stack of former tablecloths from the SGC."

Then she pulled out the exact same Janome sewing machine that I have and proceeded to whip out a cushion in a few minutes, and ended by saying "oh wow, that was so easy, so quick, so satisfying..." et cetera.

I thought: "I have that sewing machine! I like projects that are quick and easy and satisfying!"

So I was inspired to get off the lounge room floor and finally make my tourism cushions. I went a step further and made the cushions from a pillow that had split open first, but then I covered them. They were, indeed, so easy, so quick, so satisfying...

One is representing Oregon with a reprinted vintage tea towel I bought at Finnegan's Toys while hanging out with Chris, Steph, Kim and Paul.


The other is an actual vintage tea towel representing the Blue Mountains that we bought for $2 at the Mt. Tomah Markets on a holiday weekend last year.


They are going to look great in our new house!

Waiting for Mr. Cabinowner to get back to us was a bit agonzing, but in the end he agreed to drop his price to match the house in Wentworth Falls. We submitted a formal offer (pending pest and building reports).

Additionally, last Friday, someone made an offer to buy our house before auction. We asked for a little bit more, and they accepted (pending pest and building reports).

So, both reports came in today. Our house is in excellent condition so we are going to sell it! The cabin is in excellent condition so we are going to buy it! Additionally, our home loan has been pre-approved pending receipt of our supporting docs. Today was an insane day of dealing with bureaucracy but we have successfully sold one house and bought another! Contracts should exchange on Friday.

I am happy that Fog End 1.0 will be going to a nice family that have fallen in love with it the way we did. I am also happy that we made the right decision about Fog End 2.0. Hells bells, I am just happy!

We are going up to Katoomba on Saturday morning to gaze upon our new home's loveliness. I'll take some pictures then so you can get a better idea of what the place is really like. I don't think the realestate.com.au photos do the place justice.

Friends only post to follow.

Indecision! Oh the paralyzing yen for disparate ways of life! Respectable home or romantic cabin? Many circular discussions and pro/con lists later, we couldn't decide and were getting quite frustrated.

At that moment Kieren rang to invite us to play board games with the Yagoona crew--Shane, Kenny, and Eliza. We leapt at the distraction and spent the evening playing Cranium. Hilarity ensued.

The next morning I was feeling a bit ragged. Kieren has a heavy hand when he doles out the rum and I'd had a bit more than my liver really wanted to process. Chris took me out to Parramatta for a medicinal brekky of avocado cheese melts with poached eggs. Oh! So delicious. After an hour of nursing strong coffee and perusing the paper, I was fit as a fiddle.

In the arvo we were expecting company. Our friend John was dropping by for a scholarly expedition through the stacks of the Christopher Foggin Archology of Out-Of-Print Collectible Card Games. John shares Chris' unusual passion for unwanted cardboard, and they happily spent hours picking through boxes, scoffing at poorly designed collector's numbers, and trading stacks of one game for stacks of another. Coffee and then lunch and then dinner appeared before them and they grunted appreciatively before turning back to the stacks. It went on for NINE HOURS.

I am a patient wife. I was happy to amuse myself while they pursued their tedious exploits. I just feel that NINE HOURS is a noteworthy amount of time to be caressing cardboard. Take note.

My time was spent updating my blog with details of the houses we'd looked at and then making a call for our friends to give feedback here and on Facebook. Perhaps they could sway us towards one or the other.

Nearly everyone chose the Cabin in the Big Woods.

As the comments rolled in, I started to think more about why I liked each house, and the more I thought about it, the more my favours shifted in that direction. The cabin reminded me of Oregon, and is surrounded by forest and waterfalls and filled with quirky details. The solid suburban house is a very nice house...it seems like a solid financial decision to make...

Chris said that he would be very happy living in the cabin but it seemed like an aimless folkie's house and he would be more proud to show off the house in Wentworth Falls as it seemed more responsible.

That was surprising to me. I care very little about what other people think of my life choices and I had thought Chris was the same, but apparently in his old age he is craving a veneer of respectability. I argued that making decisions to suit other people's ideas was a bad life plan.

In a moment of agonized soul searching, Chris dropped to his knees and clutched at his temples. "What have I become?!" he howled.

I kid, I kid. He agreed that the point of us moving was for a better quality of life and we should pick what would make us happiest, not what was most likely to make slightly more money after 5 years.

The cabin was $5k more than the solid house. We came to an agreement that if we could get the cabin for the same price or less than the Wentworth Falls house, we would make a formal offer...

Hi there! We'd like your opinions! Please have a look at the six houses we like the best and vote for the one you think we should buy! If you could take the time to explain why in the comments, we'd appreciate it.

If you want to save time, just look at our top three properties and then vote.

Top Three:
Cabin in the Woods, Yosemite/Katoomba, $325,000
Solid Suburban House, Wentworth Falls, $320,000
Bowling Club House, Katoomba

Honourable Mentions:
Granny and Grampy House, Wentworth Falls, $299,000
Toontown House, Katoomba, $289,000
Naked Lady House, Blackheath, $319,000

Thank you for your time and effort!

We kind of like this super-dated house and if we could get it cheaply enough we would get it. It would need to be substantially cheaper than the other houses which we like more.

It's at 31 Shortland Street in Wentworth Falls. It has 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, and 1 garage.


This house is sooooo 70s. It is really clean and tidy but totally dated. The lounge room has thin striped carpet and an exposed brick wall, with a blue tile nook for the fireplace. There is an archway that leads into the dining room, and windows looking out to the covered front porch and sloped front yard.


Two of the bedrooms are decent sized and they all have built in closets. The third bedroom is pretty small and looks out onto the neighbour's brick wall which is two metres away. Depressing! There is a large linen closet in the hall, and a decent (but dated) bathroom and laundry room. The kitchen could use some more cupboards, but there is room to put in shelves or a bureau along the back wall.


The front yard is a bit of a worry. It is on a huge slope. It is beautifully landscaped and has a good retaining wall to hold it back, but, I think the house might have serious drainage issues. It's built about 2 feet down into the slope of a steep hill, and you can see that they've put in drains and gravel along the front of the house to deal with the influx of water but it worries me that the drains were full to the top with water on a day that was very hot and dry in a week of hot and dry weather. How is it in the wintertime?

The back veranda is lovely and covered, and the back yard is large with room to put lots of stuff in. Every other house on the street has a great view of the valley behind, but sadly there is a house directly behind this one, so you only get a view of that.



There is also a large shed and a decent workshop at the back of the property.

This house is one of the two we currently have ranked at equal first. The two houses we like are polar opposites. One is a hippie cabin in the woods, the other is a suburban home on a street of lawns.

46 Cook Road, Wentworth Falls. It's a 3 bedroom, 1 1/2 bathroom with a garage. $320,000


I really like this house as well. As I've said, we've got the two we like and they are equal first. It's a beautiful stuccoed brick house covered in tiny shiny whitish pebbles. The inside (except for the bathroom) has just been redone and it is immaculate. The carpets in the hall, bedrooms, and loungeroom are thick, fluffy, and a neutral cream colour. The loungeroom has a random window up in one wall and two of the bedrooms have big built in wardrobes. There is a skylight in the hallway for light during the day. Doesn't it look respectable?


The best room in the house is the kitchen. Brand new, big, with one wall taken up by a deep pantry cupboard and a tiny laundry for a stacking washer and dryer. There is room for a table and chairs in the kitchen, but there isn't a dining room. The kitchen has wood-look lino flooring. Look how beautiful that is.



There is a sliding glass door in the kitchen that goes out onto a paved deck in the backyard which could use some kind of cover. The backyard is filled with shrubbery and a lawn. the front yard has a lawn and two big eucalypts. There is a solid attic storage space with flourescent lighting that runs the full length of the house. It could be converted into an additonal room later on. The garage is big enough for a car and storage. There are shelves built into the sides of the garage and there is a nice garden shed/workshop behind it.

The house is in an easy walking distance to Wentworth Falls Lake Reserve, which has playgrounds, walking paths, swimming, and native birds. It is on the edge of a neighbourhood currently surrounded by undeveloped land.

Two of the houses we like are ranked equal first. This is one of them. 1 7th Street, Katoomba. 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 1 carport. $325,000.


This is a cedar cabin with a steelbond roof. It's heated by a slow-combustion stove. It has one very large bedroom all by itself upstairs. Two good sized bedrooms are downstairs--one at the front, one at the back. There is a large laundry/storage room in the middle of the house. The downstairs area has vaulted ceilings. The loungeroom is on the small side and flows into the dining nook off the kitchen. This room has cedar-panelled walls and the entry, wood stove, and kitchen areas have stone floors. The kitchen is nice and new with good bench space, and behind the kitchen/nook is a fairly big sunroom.


The carport has a small storage room at the back of it. Under the house is a large unfinished storage area with lights. There is a beautiful front verandah that could use some kind of cover looking out on the shrubby flower garden between you and the street:
At the back is a large rainwater tank and a small verandah covered by the sunroom above. It looks out onto a maintained native bush backyard with a slope. On one side is council reserve land, on the other side is an empty lot that has approval for a 1-bedroom cottage to be built. Behind is council reserve land providing a thick greenbelt between the houses of the street and the old Katoomba rubbish tip, which is downhill from the house and has been decommissioned. It has been filled in and is being converted to a large park.

I really like this house. It's my favourite. The natural-material construction and native gardens remind me of the neo-hippie houses people build in Oregon. I also really like the sunny upstairs room--perfect for an office. I'd go "up" to work and come back down and shut the door at the end of the day. I like the fact that it is walking distance to the lovely Minne Ha Ha Falls reserve for hiking and that soon it will be backing on to another park. I also like that it is surrounded by trees that will not be cut down.

Saturday was a pretty exhausting day of looking. For the nine rejects, ( Read more... )

I couldn't resist the pun.

The "Bowling Club House" is next door to the Katoomba Lawn Bowls Club. It's a 3 bedroom 1 bathroom house with a garage for $319,000. It's at the easy-to-remember address of 11 Bowling Green Ave, Katoomba..


It's a double brick "federation" house on the outside and a "Golden Girls" house on the inside, with old lady decor from the 80s. This one was pretty neat in spite of the horrible horrible choices made in 1989. The lounge room walls, as you can see, are the colour of bloooooooooooood.


The loungeroom window looks out onto the bowling club lawn. As you can see there is a little bench there in case you want to recline whilst you voyeuristically stare at the old dudes trotting around in their knee socks and tiny polyester shorts.

The master bedroom is big with a full wardrobe in it. The second bedroom is big without any built ins. The third bedroom is, realistically, a cupboard. There is barely enough room for a single bed and the door is made of slats, so doesn't block sound in any way. I think it is really meant to be the pantry, because it is just off the kitchen. The master bedroom and pantry are pink. The kitchen is pretty small with the fridge across a walkway from the oven sink and counters. There isn't really any cupboard space, which, again, points to that tiny room being a pantry. The bathroom is at the other side of the kitchen and features a pink toilet, sink, and tub with an aqua (!) shower stall.

Behind the kitchen is a dining nook and a door that leads to the side yard and the outside laundry.

From the lounge room is a set of stairs that leads down to a weird blue rumpus room that some handyman built in the basement. It has a short ceiling and tile floors. Along one wall is an enormous fireplace. Along another wall is a "bar" with a sink an and shelves behind it. There is a recessed nook for a television and door out to the other side yard (next to the bowling club). There is also an oddly shaped closet or cubby room off this den. It has a built-in bench in it at about waist height and has an angled wall with a plexiglass window that looks into the den and isn't big enough to contain any furniture. CRAZY.

From here there is a covered verandah that wraps around the back of the house and goes right to the fenceline. The neigbours on the other side have planted big black trees that totally block off the whole back of the house and make it dark and spooooooooky.

From looking at the pictures, my dad said this place looked haunted! I could see it. It looks pretty creepy back there under those pines...

There is another unfinished basement area under the house accessible from outside that is only good for storage of stuff you don't care about...like bodies. Bwa ha ha ha ha.

The gardens on each side are really nice as you would expect from an old lady house. There are paved walkways through the yard and established flowering hedges and a picket fence out the front. There isn't any back yard--the house goes right to the fence. There's a double garage to the side of the property that locks up.

I do like the garden and Chris kind of likes the idea of "Man Land" down in the basement but I reckon it's pretty cold and dark down there. This house had the best storage though, with the double garage, underhouse spider hole, and weird closet in the "den".

ToonTown is a section of Disneyland which was originally seen in the film "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". It features a very distinct architectural style. In certain regions of ToonTown, brightly coloured toon scenery has been erected behind the houses. You'll round a corner and see a lime green hillside backed by an aquamarine sky.


The next house, 54 Fitzgerald Street, Katoomba is a 3 bedroom, 1 and 1/2 bathroom house for "Above $289,000". It was apparently wrenched from ToonTown by a passing tornado or something:


They aren't showing many photos and we worried the place would consist of a really nice kitchen nestled in a pile of shit.


After visiting, we saw that they didn't show anything because the house had been rented by a family with little kids who'd been a bit rough on the walls from floor to as high as they could reach with implements. There were even coloured marks on the ceiling of the lounge room! The house will have to be painted inside but other than that it was pretty nice. Three decent-sized bedrooms with built in wardrobes in each one. The bathroom "complex" has a door into the lounge room and the master bedroom. The first section has a sink, mirror, and cupboard, and two separate doors lead into a toilet room and a bath and shower room. The lounge room is good sized with a stone-floored entryway. The kitchen is big and nice, and there is a dining room behind it. There's a big laundry room and an extra toilet off the dining room. There's a covered front porch and an uncovered back deck. The house also has central heating...win! At the back of the property is a "laneway" which was originally a dirt road that has entirely gone to seed. It's covered in buttercups.

It's not all good. There isn't any extra storage space like a garage, although there is an unfinished shed at the back of the yard. The yard needs some serious work. The pea-gravel driveway needs a border because it is migrating into the rest of the yard. The back yard is covered with stringy paperbark which is a fire hazard--the yard will need regular raking. The yard is edged with a short wire fence and the neighbours are really close. If we wanted any kind of privacy we'd need to put in a high colourbond steel fence or plant hedges around the yard, and wall off the covered front verandah with bamboo screens or something.

We're calling this the Naked Lady House because the current owners have stuck to a theme in their decor. A theme that is prevalent in the art festooning each room. A theme that includes naked lady pictures of the ACTUAL OWNER. Is it a little disturbing to imagine exchanging contracts with someone whose nipples I've seen? Yes. I realise "not rejected yet" is not the most stellar endorsement of a place, but that is the best we can do. The house has some really fantastic things going for it. It has a nice garden and a great covered verandah. It is next door to a watershed reserve, so it is filled with trees and is unlikely to ever be developed. The kitchen and bathroom and carpets and paint are all beautiful. BUT all the rooms are super tiny. EVERY room. We can look past one or two rooms being small but when even the lounge room can barely contain one couch, you are in trouble.

34 Third Street, Blackheath. 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom, garage. $319,000.


The front yard is not as big as that looks. All the pictures were taken with extreme fisheye lens to make the place look bigger. We were fooled...until we actually got there.

You can counter the fisheye lens in this picture. Look at the sliding glass door. You know how wide half of a sliding glass door is, right? Well, please notice that the width between the kitchen counter and the dining table chair is the same as one half of the sliding glass door. That's pretty tiny.

Can we adjust to living in a tiny house? I guess it would be easier to heat...if you didn't scorch your eyeballs by sitting on the sofa in front of the woodstove.

We rejected two places today. I dig that Chris and I are absolutely on the same page. In both cases we walked in and were immediately like..."NOPE". One was an absolute shithole and the other will make a nice house for someone, but not for us. An amusing side note? The guy who showed us these houses (Peter) went to Chris' high school, St. Pat's in Strathfield. He was about 10 years behind Chris and was friends with our friend Alex Brown. Small world!

For the rejected houses...( Read more... )

The boy and I drove up to the mountains today to start our search for Fog End 2.0.

We're looking in the Upper Mountains only, and narrowing it down to towns with a substantial strip of shops for us to frequent. That leaves Blackheath, Katoomba, Leura, Hazelbrook, and Wentworth Falls.

So, we scoured the real estate listings for places that came closest to meeting our downsizing criteria:
Under $330,000
2 bedrooms plus bonus room or 3+ bedrooms
At least 1 bathroom with tub
A less than 1/2 hour walk to "town".
At least 2 tall trees in the yard.
Some kind of reliable heat.
Bonus: Garage or carport.
Bonus: Extra storage space.
Bonus: Covered verandah.
Bonus: Central heat and air.


Our shortlist was 20 places. 4 had sold already and one had been taken off the market, so we ended up making appointments to view around 15 over the next two days. Here's a map with our progress marked. Green pins are places we like after viewing, red pins are places we are rejecting after viewing, and yellow pins are places we haven't seen yet.

View Blue Mountains House Hunt in a larger map

So, that is the introduction. Now I'll do a run down for folks like I did last time!

One last bit of house-related news, after one showing someone has made an offer to buy our current house before it goes to auction! Who knew that was even possible? We're discussing. I'll keep you posted.