On Thursday night we found a house in Diamond Creek on the internet that was open for inspection today. Doris had actually seen it a few months earlier, but we hadn’t really been looking in Diamond Creek. So we checked it out extensively on the internet. It looked quite nice, but of course most properties get presented really well (the right (wide) angle does a lot in a photo), and in real life they're often not as nice.
Note that in the above photo the house is the whole thing - you wouldn't be the first to ask 'which one of the three houses is it?'...
Doris had to accompany Christopher to a birthday party today, so I went to look at the house by myself. My practice is to take photos and videos to remind myself (it's amazing how easily you can get houses mixed up when you look at 5 or 6 in a row), and also to show Doris afterwards. So I had our little Canon camera in video-mode, giving a running commentary. It is really funny to watch this now: it starts of pretty matter-of-factly, simply describing things, but then my voice is starting to show more and more enthusiasm while I'm going through the house. It was literally love at first sight!
When I first walked in I’d forgotten the price and asked the real estate agent. It turned out that it had been auctioned the week before and passed-in (i.e. not sold), with only a $6500 gap between the highest bid and what the sellers wanted. Because the asking price was below our maximum level, I knew we could afford to buy it.
After I’d seen the house I checked out the neighbourhood and spoke to a couple of the neighbours to find out about the area. All very positive, and it is very unlikely that developments will destroy the beautiful tree-filled views from the house. Incidentally the people I spoke to were all very nice, and all immigrants… British, South African and Canadian! People often come to Australia because of the space, and for most people that is unaffordable, and not even available within cities like Sydney and Melbourne. But at the edge of these cities you can still get reasonably sized blocks of land that are affordable, and also give you a rural feel. Diamond Creek is about 30km from the centre of Melbourne – about a 40 minute drive without traffic.
After I’d checked everything out, I called Doris and told her I didn’t want to look for houses anymore… she was a bit shocked and said ‘but we need to do something Bernt’, so I suggested we’d just buy this one. ‘Is it that good?’ she asked. I picked Doris and the kids up from Bentleigh, and we had another inspection that afternoon at 4:30pm. We’re a very fortunate couple: we very much have the same taste in things, so unsurprisingly Doris and the kids loved it too, and we signed the contract by 5pm!
So what is so nice about this house? Well, basically it has got everything (we think) that we would want in a house, it is fairly new (6 years old) and in a great condition, it is architecturally designed (and the architect actually lived in it for 4 years) and well-built with good quality materials.
If we were to design and build our own house, it wouldn't be much different from this. We only would've tried to have a double garage (it has only a single garage, but the second car can be parked next to the garage, so you still get easy access to both cars), and we would've used double glazing with uPVC door and window frames. The double glazing is really a pity, but the (aluminium) window frames they used are high quality - better than the standard shocking quality they often use in Australia, even in high-end houses.
This is literally a house that meets our needs for the next 20-30 years:
It's got 4 bedrooms and a large (open) study, so with the four of us (and we're not planning on any more children) there's room for visitors. Even if Bernt's brother or sister from Holland would visit with their families, there would be enough space: they could use the upstairs area, with master bedroom, study and bathroom. 4 people could easily sleep there with a good degree of privacy and comfort.
The 'living side' of the house has a very open feel, which we both like. This is amplified by the high ceilings - I believe they're around 2.8m throughout the house (I can't reach the ceiling anywhere), another thing we would've done if we'd built ourselves.
There are essentially two large living areas with an open kitchen, from which you can go to the north-facing (so the sunny side, for you northern hemisphere dwellers...) deck and enjoy magnificent views of tree-lined hills. As you can see in the photos, the main living area (which has a real open fire place, not one of those gas-fuelled things) has large windows which capture the views.
The kitchen is in this area too, so if you're working on the island kitchen bench you can enjoy the view. There's oodles of storage space in the kitchen, and the (granite) benches are at Dutch height - i.e., Bernt can do the dishes without getting a sore back, as he does in every Australian house he's lived in, the notable exception being Taroona, where we designed our own kitchen. And Dutch height doesn't mean it's too high for Doris - it's just right. Speaking of doing the dishes - we won't have to do that anymore: there's one of those Fisher and Paykel dishwashers with two drawers: only use one, and limited water and electricity when you've got a small load.
The adjacent second living area can have a play area for the kids on one side (for the next few years at least) and the television on the other side (surround sound wiring is already in the walls). Speaking of wiring - it seems that the house is completely wired-up for data, something I would've done if we'd built ourselves too: in the study there's an outlet with 5 Ethernet sockets.
When Doris and I started looking for houses 6 years ago we saw a new house that had a very interesting feature: a shower with two showerheads on opposing walls. Ever since then I’ve been joking that I’d like that in our house, because I just ‘love looking at Doris in the shower’. We never saw that feature again, and with our subsequent 5 moves we must have seen at least 1000 houses on the internet, and visited at least 150. But… this house has it! It really feels like it is meant for us!
From rough calculations the house is about 260 m2 (or 28 squares for Australians), and the main land area (excluding the driveway) is around 850 m2. We both hate the new houses that have been in fashion in Australia for years now, where a block of land is fully filled with a huge house. You're 1.5m from the fence, and so is your neighbour, so you look straight into each other’s house. And that huge house needs to be heated and especially cooled in summer. It is unbelievable that in this day and age with resource depletion and global warming disaster looming, Australians are still building these houses. While I'm on the environmental issues - the house has a big water tank, underneath the house - again what I would've done. Plus, all water collected from all roofs end up in this water tank. (Aug 2010: I later found out only half of the roof was collected, but we put two more tanks in last year and now all water is collected).
We recently saw an example of the brain-dead, money-driven approach that builders in Australia take: friends of ours built a new house, and it's got a water tank. On the very long wall where the water tank is located, there are three or four downpipes from the roof. However ONLY ONE ends up in the water tank... when I asked why, it turns out that that's enough to give the house the government's environmental star-rating... Unbelievable.
Another friend of ours who lives in Queensland where they have enormous downpours said they may have done that because otherwise the tanks would overflow. That would be true in Queensland, but not normally in Victoria, where we should save every drop of water we can.
The Victorian government is building a huge desalination plant about 150km from Melbourne, which has huge environmental impacts: it will use ridiculous amounts of electricity, coming from coal-driven power stations, which will add enormously to our carbon emissions. And I believe there's huge direct impacts too because it makes the seawater saltier and therefore affects all flora and fauna in the ocean in the immediate vicinity of the plant.
If we collected all the rainwater that fell on the one-odd million roofs in Melbourne, we probably wouldn't need a desalination plant. The billions spent on this plant would've been much better spent subsidising water tanks. And to stay on my soapbox: if people were more careful with their water use, we really wouldn't have a problem. But it does require a change of habits. I shower with the water on for only a minute or two - the rest of the time I use a long, soaped-up cloth (the skin towel from the Body Shop), to wash my whole body. The Victorian government is trying to get people to do 3 minute showers. And the cold water that comes out of the showerhead when you turn the hot water on we collect in a bucket and put in the washing machine and toilet. So our water usage with four people (and a really inefficiently large spa bath) is less than an average Victorian household's usage of two people without a garden (our water bills show the comparison).
A quick footnote though: an environmentally conscious acquaintance recently pointed out to me that there has been so little rain in Victoria the past 5 years that even if we collected it all in tanks, there still may not be enough. So there may be a good reason for the desalination plant in the long run…
Off the soapbox again...
The water tank is used for drip-irrigating the garden. In the longer term we might use that water also for flushing the toilets for instance. The garden is quite well established, and seems to have a good variety of plants, including we think at least 6 fruit trees: we saw oranges, lemons, limes and possibly almonds. We're not big gardeners, although Doris says she likes it, and in this garden it could be fun too: it's not too big to be a burden. There's also established composting, another thing we don't have to do anymore. The land is sloping down from the house, but not so much that it's hard to get around, and there's room for a swing, trampoline etc.
And then the thing that sold Christopher: Since the house is on a slope, it is approximately 2 meters above ground level on the north side. This is where the water tank is put underneath the house, but there’s also an additional storage area (with a concreted floor) that we can convert to a model train room.
