Never Mind the Lounge, Look at the Chook Shed

We’ve been doing some house-hunting. Not with any great energy or enthusiasm because we’ll wait until my job situation is clearer, but enough to get a feel for the market.

For one thing, the houses look and feel different. The assumption is that you’ll spend as much time as possible out of doors, so most places have a deck or a verandah or an eating area in the garden. Inside, many houses are open-plan, to keep cool air circulating. This is fine, apart from when one of you wants to watch The O.C. and the other wants to listen to Tom Waits and you can’t find a solid wall and a door to put between you. En suite bathrooms and walk-in wardrobes are popular and so are DLUGS - double lock-up garages.

Forget about double glazing and, although many houses are built of brick, you’re more likely to find a kind of plaster board or even wood. When you’re used to something more solid, this can be disconcerting.

Venture outside Coffs, and the first thing you’ll be checking out is the water tank, because you probably won’t have piped water. So you’ll be relying on rain water or having the stuff brought in in a tanker. After all, most of New South Wales is still afflicted by drought. I spent an invaluable ten minutes poking around under a house in Bonville while the estate agent (an admirable woman who was building her own house, yes, with her own hands) tried to work out the system of pumps that the vendor had installed. “This needs spraying,” she said when she emerged, casting a wary glance at the spiders’ webs.

Which, inevitably brings me to the wildlife. We’ve inspected one house with a herd of kangaroos happily living in the field next door. Unhappily for the kangaroos, the field is to become a retirement village. More interesting was the carpet snake hanging from the rafters of the shed of a house not far from here. Unfortunately, it showed no interest in the rapidly-retreating estate agent (a different one) who informed me from the safety of the door that the snake was harmless, which I knew. She then carried on trying to pull the wool over my eyes about plans for a new road at the bottom of the garden. So there are some similarities with the UK.

Also, does one look for somewhere near a beach or go inland where one can buy somewhere “on acreage”? We need to sort out a few things before we decide and, frankly, one acre would do. However, we’ve found that the rural agents are much straighter and say things like “this is a great place but the highway’s coming through here” and “that land’s no good for cattle”. I also liked “that chook shed’s nearly new” and ”this place is a mess - you’d need new carpets - but you’d get it cheap.” And he wasn’t only referring to the pattern of the carpets.