Lessee

If you’ve been following our lease / housing decisions, this is a final update.

I’ll recap the whole scenario, in excruciating detail, for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about.

We were initially thinking of moving because our landlord was going to put our rent up by $20 per week, which we weren’t too happy about. We asked if they would replace the carpet that is badly stained, or perhaps give us an air conditioner seeing as they were asking for an extra $1,040 out of us for the year, or at least not increase the rent so much as incentive for us to stay. The rental agent said neither of those things were likely to happen, so we looked elsewhere.

A two-bedroom house looked promising, and I went to look at it last Wednesday morning with the owner. It turned out we were both seeing the property inside for the first time since the owner had bought it after seeing it on the internet. Basically on seeing it he considered it unrentable and said, if we were still interested, to make him an offer.

On consideration, we thought this would be an opportunity to save a great deal of money as he would be improving the property, so I called the owner back on Thursday morning. His phone went straight to voicemail and I couldn’t get in touch with him before Friday, when we had to hand in our two weeks notice to leave our current unit. We were trusting that the owner of the house we wanted to move to would get back to us. I knew he was returning from overseas November 14, which would give us three days to move if he agreed to our offer, but few options if he didn’t.

On Monday, however, our rental agent phoned me and asked if we had found somewhere to move to. Apparently the owner of our unit had been away the week previously, so was unable to respond to our requests. The owner offered to purchase an airconditioner if we paid for installation, new tiles or floorboards to replace the carpet, and to increase the rent by only $5 per week. With no guaranteed accommodation if we left, a fantastic offer to stay, and the fact that we like our apartment, we agreed to renew our lease for 12 months based on those conditions.

This has been a long post, but I was asked in an email, “when/are you moving house? and to where?“

Knowing the asking party reads this blog, there is your answer. We are staying where we are, which is a blessing really, since we own a bunch of crap that neither Kate or I was looking forward to moving!