Housie!

30th September 2005

....................................GNOME SWEET HOME
............................
For the last few months Mrs K and I have been searching for a place to call our own (The kumara patch?). I have looked at so many houses I don’t think I will ever be able to look at a house again, without checking it’s aspect or assessing it’s paint work. Or without slowing down and looking in when I see a real estate FOR SALE board.
Recently, with my paint plattered stubbies on, around the barbie, I have shocked myself with the house talk, I have had dribbling from my mouth:
“value added”
“capital gain”
“smells like curry”
“negative gearing”
“lick of paint”
etc...
For some reason, and this may be some sort of karmatic (new word alert!) joke, every house we were interested in was just outside our price range. To remedy this problem, like thousands of other Aucklanders, we have been forced to look further out. So now the edge of, what I would call, the city ring is at Avondale, where it once would have been at Sandringham, where we live now.
But Sandringham has ‘gone’ as they say or ‘already gone off’ and unless I win lotto there is no way we could buy here.
Well we could, but it would be a two room unit.
In Ponsonby and Grey Lynn where I have lived most of my life I could probably only buy a damn toilet.
It would be a very fashionable toilet, with a fabulous view of women who know what ‘body control pilates’ is, power walking with three wheel prams, but a toilet nevertheless. The thing I wonder is, how much further out can people continue to go. If the discerning couple, who would once buy a house in Grey Lynn, now look in Avondale where will they look in ten or twenty years time? New Lynn, Glen Eden? and also, where will the people who used to live in those places go? They will be forced into the sea. It’s quite a weird thought and I envision a time where almost the WHOLE of Auckland will be too expensive for a modest family to live in.

In the process of looking we have got to know the strange language, which is peculiar to real estate. It is in some ways helpful but in (many) other ways pretentious and misleading, or just plain old fashioned bullshit.
The pretentious stuff is in phrases like “offering stupendous in and out flow” (I’m not joking these are real, verbatim descriptions -) and
“A restrained use of materials has been utilised throughout”
What the hell does that mean? How can you NOT use materials? How can you restrain them?
and I think that whoever abducted the word ‘offering’ and placed it in captivity in the real estate world, deserves to be thrown into prison by the pretention police.
With the advent of websites such as homesell, people can write the descriptions themselves. Therefore - ( and this, sage advice, can be applied equally to the sale of almost anything)
be wary of anything described as “funky” It will usually mean the house comes from a decade with a dysfunctional relationship with good taste and can involve “conversation pits”, fake archways on doors and colours like purple and orange thrown together during an acid trip in 1974.
If a house is described as “trendy” get the hell out of the website as quickly as your mouse will carry you.

The most disturbing mistruths in real estate are more like outright lies. The most common is to list a house as having say, three bedrooms, when one of them is the size of a coffin. If I am with an agent I will usually make a wee scene about such an obvious stretching of the facts say things like;
“this is the other room is it?”
“This here?!”
“Where does the bed go? I suppose I could just force it in there and lean it against the wall.
But I pretty much like my beds, y’know horizontal. I’m kinda old fashioned in that way ”

If I was more cheeky I suppose I could take a cat along and try and swing it around in there. After it had hit the wall a few times, I think the agent would get the picture.

Future launch site of HMS Creektrek

Until last week, out of the hundreds of houses we had looked at, we had only put an offer in on one single house, which has been pretty depressing. Suddenly last week, when we were about to resign ourselves to life in a trailer park, we had two fantastic opportunities. One needs work, but is a brick and tile with a lot of potential. The other was in a better hood and was completely finished in a style I was not sure we would ever be able to achieve. Suprisingly (I’m still surprised even know as I write this) we put in a low offer on the cheap one and it was excepted. The surprise, is in the fact that they accepted our first offer and more so, that we didn’t take the option of the immaculate, completed trouble-free house.

The thing is, we are in it for the long haul and every single drop of paint lavished on the shoddy walls, every piece of crap removed and every ounce of sweat expelled will be done with great love and will move us closer to the completion of the definitive ‘Kumara Patch’. Which somehow makes it a bit more appealing and more worthwhile. Also the crappy house had a table tennis table, which pretty much decided it for me.

Stately Kumara Manor (ping pong table!)
Although the house is a bit rough now, we know it will scrub up well and, in the parlance slagged above - “it has good bones”. It also has it’s own creek and a bush reserve, which no ugly developer will ever be able to appropriate, and blight with garish faux classical monstrosities.
The deal will get the final ‘go ahead’ in approximately two weeks time, pending a LIM report. Wish us luck. Also, brush up on your sanding skills and expect a desperate call in about three weeks time...