For those of you who haven't been following my attention-whoring on the RL AaToW thread, here's the skinny! For those of you that are, here are even more FACTS and INFORMATIONS:
Me and my fiance, Paul, are buying THIS HOUSE: http://www.acton.com.au/mountlawley/?pa ... ID=2167914 - check it! Aren't they pretty pictures? We're planning on ruining it with our awful design aesthetic. I'm going to cross-stitch some characters from my little pony though and we can hang them up around the place! So very tacky
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
The main reason we chose this house was the location as well as the size of the inside. The location is phenomenal - it's in a cheap suburb, but on the good side (it's literally on the good side of the train tracks, and 200m away from a suburb that is $100k-$200k more expensive), and it's 900m from the train station and 5km away from the city centre. It's also pretty close to a couple of nice big main roads and right near some arterials, which is good as Perth is a driving city.
We currently live 2 hours away from the house so we have this lovely thing called a buyer's agent. Apparently they're really common in the USA but not so much here! She's charging us $4,000 but she's basically doing everything for us. All the forms, arranging the inspections, getting quotes, etc. She also negotiated the price of the house and got it for $460k instead of the $469k we totally would have offered without her, so she's saving us $5,000! Not to mention all the stress.
Finance on the mortgage is going to be approved hopefully today or tomorrow. We're able to buy it solely on my income, which has some tax/finance implications in the future depending on how things go for us. Mortgage would work out to something like $600/week, and a similar rental would cost $450/week without equity and with the housing market and the area we're in, the equity is very valuable.
Got the house inspection report yesterday. Turns out it needs a lot of work done - understandable considering it's a 1940s house. The roof in particular is causing problems with the ceiling. Fortunately our contract states that the seller needs to pay for this sort of thing to be fixed, or at the least give us a discount. (It seems awfully like when you say "hey, this couch is a bit scuffed, can I get a discount?" when you're at a garage sale, except getting the scuff fixed might cost several thousand dollars and not having it fixed might make the ceiling fall in on your head while you're asleep). Again our lovely agent is gonna take care of quotes and negotiating all that for us too.
If all goes according to plan, we'll get the keys on the 4th of December. I start work in a location near the new house on the 7th of January (after having about 3 weeks off work over xmas - yay), so hopefully we'll have enough time to move in and get things sorted out. Going to need to work out some furniture on the cheap. My parents have promised us a new, cheap fridge as well as their very old fridge (for emergency party situations where we need lots of place to store beer). Maybe get a roommate, even. Rooms in the area go for about $150-$200 pw including bills.
But yeah, the damn thing is going to need maintenance and neither me nor Paul have a maintenance-inclined bone in our bodies. Things like the gutters, and some of the asbestos needs to be painted so it doesn't give us cancer. You know, the usual!