Opening a new door to the future
It took us a year to find this house. That was a long time ago now, before children, and with two fulltime incomes, and almost in a parallel universe.
We’d teetered on giving up the search. The competition was fierce, and we’d put in several offers and missed out each time.
Partly, we were being cautious. It was such a phenomenal investment, and we wanted to have the time and headspace to make a sensible decision. There was little chance for that, though – people were buying houses sight unseen. If you waited, or put conditions on your offers, you lost out.
We were a nuisance for real estate agents, refusing to give them any positive feedback on anything we’d viewed for fear that each sign of approval would bump up the price by another 10 grand. We’d walk through with our poker faces, asking questions about wiring and insulation, and then whisper excitedly when we were back out on the street.
It wasn’t a particularly helpful approach, and we missed out and missed out.
Eventually, we stumbled across a private sale that ticked most of our boxes, and the process was polite and painless. We were skittish, but the sellers were sensible and kind. Our upper price limit matched their lower price limit, and so that was that.
Two years, my partner and I told each other, trying to soften the blow of making a quarter-milliondollar investment. We’ll be in here for two years, and then we can do something else if we want. Travel the world. Move to another part of the country.
‘‘This could be the nursery,’’ the owner had winked as she showed us the second bedroom.
We told her there were no immediate plans for that. We were pregnant within the month.
So two years came and went, and of course we stayed, happy with this unexpected new life we were living, even if it was alarmingly suburban.
After our second child and the increasing level of chaos, my partner started making noises
about buying a new family home.
I was wildly non-committal. I loved our wee house, even though it was bursting at the seams. I felt like we were just one decent clearout away from having everything under control (a belief I clung to for years).
It’s warm, we have a huge yard, and we’re just around the corner from not one but three of our various sisters and their partners. I know where the fruit stalls are, and which routes into town have the smoothest footpaths and the most sunshine.
Also, I know this house from top to bottom. We’ve painted, and added storage and decks, and thought through every variation for maximising its liveability. We know where the sun hits in the winter and where the puddles appear in heavy rain. We know the precise pattern to flick the sensor light switch so that it stays on.
I couldn’t be bothered getting to know a new house, and a new neighbourhood. It would be like embarking on a new relationship – exciting, but a little exhausting, and life was exhausting enough.
Still, there came a point when even I had to acknowledge that our comfort zone could perhaps be a little more, well, comfortable.
We got a cold call from a real estate firm – it’s generally them ringing, or my mum – asking if we’d like a free valuation. We’ve said no a dozen times at least in the past seven years, but this time I hesitated, and said yes. No obligation, they promised, but it set something in motion.
It was the agent’s visit that convinced me in the end. Not because of the price she suggested – although it would appear that a first home in Motueka is now closer to an eye-watering half a million dollars than the $250,000 that we’d thought was so outrageous in 2012. It was the fact that, of the 50 things on our eternally hovering to-do list, she pointed out about five.
Finish the garden along that border, she said. Paint this, straighten that, hang those curtains properly, and declutter. That’s it. Done.
It was like a veil lifting. No-one else noticed, or cared about, the slightly scuffed skirting boards or the worn varnish at the edge of the kitchen bench. It’s a 1950s house – solid as a rock, and that’s what matters, not the dent in the floor where we dropped that piece of firewood.
We’re finishing off things beyond what the agent noted, more for our own sense of closure than from necessity.
The house has been good to us. We never completed that list – does anyone? – but we’ll be proud to pass it on to the next family.
The time has come to start researching fruit stalls in other parts of town.