Friday – More House Hunting in the East

Once again we set off with our Melways, paperwork file, and a bag full of cold water, we have learnt our lesson and been spending a fortune at petrol stations buying bottled water for us all. Once again we headed down the Nepean Highway, this is a beautiful road, taking you through leafy suburbs, it is soo green, with lots of trees, close to the beach it has such a different feel to it, as soon as you leave the city it is as though you are in a different world. But because it is so beautiful and so close to such beautiful beaches rentals really are like rocking horse poo, well rentals you would live in are. There are lots of rentals, but I wouldn’t step inside the majority never mind live in. This is the older, more established side of Melbourne which means older houses and also very expensive houses, this is where we needed to be practical, we needed somewhere Jason could commute to the city, a rental we could afford but also in an area where we could afford to buy eventually if we decide to stay.

We set off to Mount Eliza which is where I had set my heart on living, Jason had initially said that Frankston was the cut off, but knew now that if we wanted to live on this side of the bay we would need to live a little further out. Mount Eliza was very picturesque, a little village with the most amazing houses, while we were driving round we saw the signs for Sefton Grange at Mount Martha, this is a new development and one we had looked at from the UK, they had sent us a couple of emails and left a couple of messages for us, Jason said he would pop in and just tell them that as we hadn’t sold in the Uk we couldn’t look at buying.

The kids and I just sat in the car, when Jason came back he had a key, it was to a house which is for rent, I had seen the house on realestate.com, but thought that it might be too far out for Jason to travel to work, we had a drive into the estate which is lovely, http://seftongrange.com.au/index.asp?id=03 click on the big arrow to see some more pictures of the development. The house was lovely, very simple as it is a rental, they landscape the front but not the back garden, but that is Ok, it has an area where we will be able to sit out, but as we are coming into winter that may not be that frequent anyhow. It has 4 bedrooms a study, large open plan living and dining room and kitchen, a utility room, and downstairs loo, master bed with walk in robes and en-suite, 3 other beds and a house bathroom.

It was lovely and had a good feel about it, we went back to the office to take the key back and Jason asked if we could apply now, the guy gave us the paperwork and said we could take it away or fill it in now and he would fax it to the office for us , we weren’t sure if they would accept our application or how it would work as they had an open house planned for Saturday 12th. But the guy in the office was great, we pulled out everything we had as proof of ID, our mortgage statement, bills showing we had paid them, Jason’s job offer to name but a few. He explained that we needed to 100 points made up from a list of things, because we had so much info with us we had well over 100 points, we filled out the paperwork, and he faxed the application to the office, he then rang and asked if they could look at our application as a priority, I think him ringing made a difference to our application as though he was endorsing it in some way, while we were filling out the paperwork, 2 other families looked at the house but they took application forms away. We then set off to look at schools, well the closest is about 2 minutes away, shopping centres and of course the beach which is about 10 minutes drive.