We've got a house room!

Last Monday we went to ChCh again and while we were looking for houses we came across a very nice one. In order to be eligible for the house, we had to make a rental offer on it. A rental offer is binding, and as a result you cannot make any other offer on another house when the offer is made, because if both landlords take your offer, you have to rent both houses.

At 11:00 AM we made the offer. There was one other lady who would make an offer as well. At first, she would make the offer early in the afternoon. Then she would make it late in the afternoon. Then it would be delayed until 1:00 PM the next day. 1:05 PM the next day we received a call that the other lady did get the house. That was a major disappointment. Mostly because we more or less had expected that we would get the house, but also because the landlord obviously had preferred the other lady to begin with, and it had cost us a whole day waiting for that call.

After we had recovered from the disappointment we reconsidered whether we would want a house to start out with, or maybe just one room instead. The stuff that’s in the container on its way here can be stored in my father’s garage for some time to come, so we don’t necessarily have to have a house to put it all in when the container arrives. A room would be cheaper of course, and rental houses usually have a minimum rental term of six months. That is pretty long since we don’t even know yet where we are going to end up having a job etc. A room to start out with suddenly didn’t appear as such a bad choice after all. We looked in the news paper ads for rooms to let, and Wednesday we went to ChCh once again to look at some of them.

Outside the first room the fag ends were laying on the doorstep, so we passed on that one :-) The second room was not that nice, but the third one was pretty neat.

The room was in a house with a maximum of 4 flat mates. The kitchen and the bathrooms were cleaned by a cleaning lady twice a week, so we wouldn’t have to do that, oh luxury :-) NZ$ 200 per week, including energy and telephone! We liked the concept, so we went for that one. Tomorrow (October 5) we are moving in there already! Hopefully we will make good contact with our flat mates, our first integration into NZ society :-)

The house can be seen pretty nicely from the air using Google Earth. In the picture on the left hand side I have coloured the roof of our house red. In the next post more pictures from the ground :-)