The first half of February was spent house-sitting for Louise and Geoff while they were cruising on a yacht off the coast of Tasmania near Hobart. We settled in nicely at the Wilsons and anticipated lots of walks in the nearby Lane Cove National Park which unfortunately never actually happened. But it felt rather luxurious having a kitchen four times the size of our whole campervan! I also enjoyed finding our car covered in crepe myrtle blossom every time we went out to it; it’s quite pretty when you drive off and the pink blossom sprays all over the windscreen. It was handy being able to constantly spread our paperwork all over their dining room table in an attempt to get on top of everything that we needed to get done. Thank you very much Louise and Geoff for lending us your lovely home and the company of the incomparable Charlie.
We caught up with many more friends and we took our niece, Victoria, out for lunch; an early celebration of her 21st birthday, as the next day she was flying off to Phuket in Thailand for a week. We also viewed quite a few movies; Rodney now has a ‘Seniors card’ so he’s loving the half-price movie tickets. We’ve seen ‘Life of Pi’, ‘Silver Linings Playbook’, ‘Searching For Sugarman’, ‘Lincoln’, ‘The Impossible’ and best of all, ‘The Intouchables’, a brilliant French movie; if you get a chance to see it, we recommend you do.
On February 6th we finally went round to Garland Road to view our house and we were both so spun out by what we encountered, that neither of us actually did have a proper look around; we didn’t even enter the front bedroom! The place was a dirty, untidy mess and I couldn’t believe that the tenant hadn’t made an effort to make the place look nice before the owners popped in. What shocked me more was that the rental agents thought it was fine! We also found out quite a few alarming details of the past tenants’ bizarre behaviour and then visited all of our neighbours to apologise for what they’ve been through in our absence. Then more problems started, resulting in weeks of very unpleasant stress and sleepless nights dealing with our seemingly incompetent, property agent. We re-checked the figures regarding damage, cleaning, repair, rubbish removal and unpaid rent from the previous tenant and discovered that the agents had very many errors in their accounting, the major one being that they had entered our ‘returned bond/deposit’ as ‘rent paid for August’. This meant we couldn’t claim for unpaid rent for that month as the Insurers used the statement as proof that we had received the August rent. We demanded a meeting with the agents and when we finally got together we had to accept all their excuses, but still couldn’t get them to understand our need for accurate accounting. We spent days going over and over every dollar that was spent, paid, received, or unpaid and I compiled Excel spread sheets for the Insurers. Finally, after I had sat on the agent’s doorstep, refusing to move until I could get a final bit of proof regarding the bond, we felt that we had everything we needed to make an insurance claim. Fortunately, our Insurers were really patient and understood the struggles that we had with the agent. On presenting everything to our assessor in person, he had the claim signed off and the money in our bank account in two days. The sense of relief that we no longer had to waste any more time on fighting the property agent, was tremendous.
We’ve decided to not leave the current tenant in there after the year’s agreement is up; we’re going to move back in and put our home back in order in late October, when we get back from our next European trip. There’s a lot to do including re-sanding and re-sealing all of the wooden floorboards from the front door right through to the back door, hopefully this will remove the dog-wee stains. The carpets in two bedrooms have to be ripped up and replaced. And we’ll repaint all the walls and fix up the dog chewed skirting board, etc., etc. We’re hoping we can get it all done in the month of November, before our friends Bill & Ang come to stay.
Halfway through February we left West Chatswood and said goodbye to our new chatty kitty mate, Charlie, who we will really miss. Mind you, I bet he has forgotten us already. We moved back in with Vanea and Peter in Willoughby and we now wake to the sound of one or two butcherbirds outside our bedroom window. They are a bird with an amazing repertoire of song and for some reason it seems such an Australian sound to me. I love it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfaplSc5ieM
Rodney has been trying to earn our keep with some digging and we’re being as helpful as we can with the cleaning, washing, bug removal, etc. He’s booked and cancelled flights and hotels all over the world, finally resigning ourselves to the fact that the ski trip to Japan and the brief replacement ski trip to Colorado were off the agenda. The drive up the coast was also cancelled, changed to a trip down the coast for us to spend some time alone together and then we turned it back around to a drive up the coast. All we knew for sure was that the flights to England were booked for March 16th and that that booking was not going to change. We had planned to start our next journey in Eileen travelling south from Denmark, but we’re now going to leave Eileen in England and fly to Zurich to ski in Arosa, Switzerland for a week over Easter, so we may be taking the campervan on the boat over to Holland later in April and heading south from there. Then again this may just be ‘Plan 24E’ and things could change again in the retired world of Rodney and Laura.
Not sure what happened to our plans for a relaxing time in Sydney, I guess it was a silly plan. We had thought that we would have time to enjoy Sydney and remind ourselves of why we love living here, but somehow we’ve been wrapped up in everything else but. However we have managed to enjoy a few days at the beach. We’ve picnicked at Fairlight Beach and we did drive down to Balmoral Beach on one beautiful day and strolled in the water from one end of the bay to the other, with an ice cream in hand; I wished we had gone for longer with swimmers and towels to hand. So I finally got my body board out of storage and we had two lovely mornings at Freshwater Beach catching waves.
Unfortunately on Feb 23rd the weather took a big turn for the worse and the rain came down…..constantly.
“Home is your shelter from storms, all sorts of storms”. William J Bennett
That must be why I feel a need to have a home again, or even just a campervan……!
