House hunting

The interview with Designline was very positive. They would have liked to hire me, if they would have had any work for me to do :-) So that job offer went south. I also had another interview in Christchurch, however that too didn’t get me to the next step. We are starting to get pretty fed up with driving from Ashburton to Christchurch all the time, so we have begun to spend some more time looking for houses there.

Last Friday we went to Simes, a real estate rental company. Of course we again had to fill out an extensive form before they would even talk to us, but after that they gave us a list with all their rental properties. The rest of the day we have spent touring Christchurch to look at the houses from the outside (a so-called drive-by). They gave us the keys from one of the houses, so we could check that one out on the inside too.

Most of the houses here have pretty small bedrooms compared to Holland, a bit like the houses built in th 40’s. That is a bit of a concern, particularly because a container full of furniture is currently making its way towards ChCh. No idea where we have to put all that... oh well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

In contrast with the houses in Holland, which normally are rented completely bare, houses in NZ are rented out with carpets and curtains fitted. When you are lucky these have been put in place recently. The house we went inside to look however, was so unbelievably dirty that we didn’t even dare to touch anything. The standard Dutch student house would be called “very clean” compared to that house. And that is something that doesn’t show up in the agent’s pictures :-) Oh well, we also saw a few houses that were very clean, so it wasn’t all like this one house.

The rent has to be paid per week; not per month. A unit with two small bedrooms is about NZ$220 per week, 3 small bedrooms will cost you about NZ$290 per week. As we still have no income, and as this house will be a temporary solution anyway, I think we will opt for two bedrooms.

After a full day cruising through ChCh we developed a pretty clear picture of the houses we wanted to investigate further. So the next day (Saturday) we once more spent an hour and a half driving to the rental shop to get the keys of the four houses we wanted to see on the inside. Well... two of the four houses they already had rented out the day before. For the other two they had to make an appointment with the owner to organise a viewing. While waiting for the appointment call we went driving to ChCh again, looking at yet more houses. When later in the afternoon the rent shop had finally contacted the owners of the houses we wanted to see, it turned out that the owners already had rented out the houses by themselves, without notifying the rent shop first. You could say the whole exercise of driving through ChCh the past day had been in vain. We had learned the hard way that agreements are not worth a lot over here in NZ. Oh well, that is Kiwi Land, too.

In the mean time we have become interested in a few other houses, so that’s something for Monday to do. Hopefully the title of our next post here will be “We’ve got a house!”