It’s August, 2020. Armageddon is upon us. I know I wrote a mocking piece about the Rapture a while back, but honestly, this is feeling like the real thing. Fires, plague, comets, insect swarms, Donald Trump … sh*t’s getting real. I’m sorry I mocked it, okay? Stop already.
Continue readingAs a bit of an epilogue to the saga of our restoration of the bit of Australian Architectural History, I promised to add some photos.
You can see the professional ones done by the good photographers at the Design Files. Those are amazing, much better than anything I could take.
I have a policy of only putting my own photos up on this blog — very long story involving a copyright troll operating from underneath a bridge in Las Vegas — but I’ll make a small exception here to include some publicly available real estate photos so you can see what changed. Keep in mind they used a wide angle lens, which I can’t reproduce.
Continue readingAt this point in the narrative, I’m a little worried you might think that the restoration of our Priceless Piece of Australian Architectural History was an unmitigated nightmare and that I was on the verge of catastrophic sleep failure.
So let me reassure you. There were many, many things that were going well. Sure, the completion date was moving away from us at a fairly steady pace and our starting budget was only a rosy memory. But with Jane and Christopher on the scene, we were spared the majority of the minutiae.
Continue readingI left you after the last post about to rip the carpets out of the bedrooms. We’d tried to peek at the state of the floor around the heating/AC vents earlier, but given the presence of mould on the east wall, I wasn’t too optimistic.
Continue readingYou may recall, in the last episode, I was lying awake fretting about neurotoxic mould and wondering if we had made the biggest mistake of our lives.
Well, morning arrived and the house was still ours. We went by to meet the project foreman, Andrew. During the night a large branch from the gum tree in front of the house had broken off. These eucalyptus trees are known as widowmakers, for their propensity to unexpectedly shed branches at random moments and kill people. Fortuitously, this one missed the roof and it happened at night, so no one got hurt. Was it a sign? As in Yes this project is going to be full of scary surprises but no one will die. Continue reading
That’s what the builder said, a couple of months into the Project.
You don’t open a can of worms, and not expect to find any worms in it…
In September 2017 our Australian Real Estate Adventure came to an end. We had signed the papers for Salter House, negotiating a long settlement (January 15) in exchange for fifty grand off the price. That gave us lots of time to think about what we wanted to do. Continue reading
Today our Melbourne restoration project went up on a design blog! Here’s the back story of how we ended up getting the house in the first place. The renovations? A whole other story for another day.
Marc and I are not real estate neophytes. We have bought and sold houses in three countries. I know the sellers’ tricks and the buyers’ tactics. We were flush with cash from selling our Vancouver townhouse and ready to embark upon yet another real estate adventure on a new continent, in a new city. Our stuff was sitting in a storage facility, and we were living out of suitcases. We needed to settle down.
About a year ago in an attempt to make some connections in Melbourne, I joined the Crosbie Crew, a horde of enthusiastic runners led by a guy named Tim Crosbie. A bunch of them had just finished an epic trail run and for the first couple of weeks, that was all they talked about. The Two Bays. I felt like I had missed out on the run of the century. It also seemed kind of crazy, to do a long trail run like that in the middle of the hot Australian summer. Continue reading
As many of you know from past posts, I’m a runner. I am much slower than I was in my 20s, and I rarely enter races any more. I find them a bit demoralizing, not to mention expensive. I’m not going to set any PRs, so why bother?
But there was one event that I hadn’t yet ticked off the list, and that’s the marathon. I watched Marc train for and suffer through a few, and earned a healthy fear of the distance. We had hiked 27 miles one day on our Oregon hike, and I was completely trashed.
You have to seriously train for a marathon, Marc said, in a serious voice. Seriously.
I haven’t done anything serious for years! Plus, there’s all that research showing that ultra long distance running is terrible for your heart.
Maybe I should just eat cookies instead.
But this year, I decided the time had come. Enough is enough. I’m going to run a marathon! Continue reading
Facebook greeted me with this today:
Your friends haven’t heard from you in a while. Time to write a blog post.
Ouch. No arguing with that, is there? Welcome to the era of cyber-motivation.
My blogging apparatus is rusty in the extreme — hopefully my brain is still firing on all cylinders. I put the laptop on the glass-and-wicker table in the apartment we’re renting on the 16th floor of a downtown Melbourne high-rise, crack my knuckles and stretch out my arms. Continue reading