Why we moved house 5x in 5 months in Magical Realism

Original plan was to sell the Canberra place and ideally find something in Sydney. I thought this would take at least a few months to sell so I booked a month each in Bronte and Bondi to see how we liked living there, and figured we could see how things went from there.

#1 Bronte Beach house - Rented sight unseen and long story short, BLACK MOULD. The landlord tried to argue with me, saying the cleaners had just missed the mould since they are short (what?) but they’d clean it and that since I was not from Australia that I didn’t understand that this is just the normal healthy Sydney winter beach black mould, not the toxic black mould. Okaaay. Lots of crazy messages ensued, but I just forwarded everything to customer services and thankfully got refunded.

#2 Hyde Park aparthotel On the fly rented this place as a temporary measure mainly because it was a short walk to my new job and I was just exhausted ever day from cosplaying a human in real life instead of via Teams meeting. It had a rooftop pool, hot tub, and sauna which was really nice to share with A at the beginning or end of a long day.

In the meantime the landlord of the 1A Bondi apartment I’d booked for the second month messaged me. We had stayed in this building twice before, perfect location and water view right above the Bondi Icebergs club. Then I got an email from the owner saying the lifts would be out. Normally this wouldn’t be a dealbreaker for me, but they didn’t even offer any discount or anything for the inconvenience, so I just said that wouldn’t work for us and requested to cancel. I think this was for the best as I didn’t need to find another place for 3 weeks before moving to Bondi for a month. At this point I was exhausted too with only a 10 minute walk to work, so the idea of moving back out to the beach with a longer commute involving unreliable local transportation seemed unfathomable.

I found a couple of short term rental companies that seemed to cater to new arrivals to Sydney. The places were tiny and overpriced but had good locations and decent amenities. They were also month to month which was nice in terms of flexibility. I found a couple and had A take a look while I was at work. The #3 Surry Hills unit seemed the best of the batch and we could stay there as long as we wanted and move out with 2 weeks notice once we found something to buy or rent longer term.

In the meantime, our Canberra place was not selling, and the realtor we had signed with for 2 months was just useless. Like absolutely no market knowledge or even common sense, crazy racist comments, and overall a horrible person in every way. Once the term was up we found a different company to rent out the unit instead. They found us a lovely tenant for a 2 year lease and so far that has worked out well. Yay.

Once we had the Canberra stuff sorted we started to look at some Sydney sales/rentals. Saw some really great places but things never worked out. Then we saw 2 rentals in one day - neighbouring buildings but otherwise couldn’t be more different.

One was this crazy sprawling apartment with terraces at the top of a landmark commercial building. It had some very interesting built in cabinetry and a full size sauna. It hadn’t been renovated in forever but was quirky and interesting. There was too much that needed to be done to make it nicely liveable for a rental, but if it were for sale I probably would have bought it.

On the way out the broker took us to see another place next door. #4 Downtown pad was a modern, full service concierge building, smaller in size but sleek decor and but most importantly had a 50 meter indoor/outdoor pool with a partial glass bottom. There was also a sauna, two gyms and a screening room. Honestly once I saw the pool I was in love. It was a little pricey but when you factored not needing to pay for gym or pool memberships, and everything being just downstairs, it was well worth it. We applied and got it and moved in right away.

It came with stove/dishwasher, fridge, dryer, etc. but we had to get our own clothing washing machine, which is apparently the norm here. Then things started to go wrong. The oven didn’t work. The dishwasher didn’t work and would turn on and make horrible noises in the middle of the night. We were there less than a month when the pool closed for renovation and was expected to last 3 months and wouldn’t be available for 25% of our one year lease. The apartment was also SOOO noisy. It was facing a street with street performers who would play constantly throughout the day and night and most of them were SO bad. But had very loud amplifiers and microphones. We were 33 floors up but it was so loud and the building was so poorly constructed it was always so noisy.

I think we were there for just under 2 months and never had a working oven or dishwasher. The pool closing was the final straw - there was no way they didn’t know of the scheduled renovation and didn’t even offer any rent reduction for the non working appliances or amenities. Their proposed “solution” was that we could end the lease with two weeks notice without penalty. (Gee, thanks.) I don’t think they were expecting us to do that but we went out that weekend to see if we could find another option.

We only saw one place, close to the water in a converted warehouse from the 1800’s. Floor to ceiling windows, 16 foot/5 meter ceilings, hardwood floors, very unique. We applied and ended up getting it. I was so fed up with the other place and it’s management, we took it, even though it meant moving all our shit including a washing machine now again. It was a massive pain and while things have been better, I’m just exhausted.

Hopefully #5 Current Place will be our home for a while.