And their acrylic rings:

I really wanted to get the first home owner grant and stamp duty rebate so I decided to find a job in Tasmania and move down here for the required 6 months. After jetting down to Tasmania for a round of interviews one day, I managed to get 3 offers of employment. I chose to take a job which involves typing court transcripts. Luckily for me, my boss at my job in Sydney offered me a 6 month leave of absence, and said that if it doesn’t work out in Tasmania and I decide to go back to Sydney, they will leave my old job open for me. I grabbed at the offer, as it was a great fall back if it fails down here.

I then set about purchasing a 6 x 9 foot trailer and filled it with 3 months’ worth of business stock, our washing machine and our clothes dryer, plus my clothes and my computer, and set off driving from Sydney down to Melbourne and then from Melbourne onto the Spirit of Tasmania ferry, across Bass Strait and into the port of Devonport at the top of Tasmania. We then drove from the top of Tasmania to our house south of Hobart in the Huon Valley. We traveled approximately 1,588 km 3 days. Tim came down with me for the drive and to help me settle in for the first week. Unfortunately he just wasn’t able to stay with me and live in Tasmania as he decided to stay in Sydney and keep working until August when he would be eligible to get a transfer with Australia Post down to Tasmania.

Prior to leaving Sydney, it just so happened that one of Tim’s friends had to move from a house to an apartment and, as a result, wasn’t able to keep his 2 year old American staffy named Smokey. Sure enough, I was going to need some company while I was down in Tasmania by myself for 4 months and we have a good sized block of land, so we agreed to be Smokey’s new owners. We arranged for Smokey to be flown from Sydney to Hobart and two days after we arrived at our house after the long drive from Sydney, we collected Smokey from the airport.

Since arriving in Tasmania, things have gone well enough. The first few weeks of being here was particularly hard, with starting a new job, looking after Smokey and looking after myself. It has been hard – much harder than I thought – living here by myself with Tim in Sydney so far away. To my dismay, I soon discovered that we have some bogan neighbours who enjoy having drunken parties every weekend. One night I had to call 000 because they were fighting and throwing bottles, swearing, yelling, screaming and threatening each other. As a result of these parties, I dreaded the weekends and every now and then I booked poor Smokey into the local kennels and flew to Sydney to be with Tim for the weekend and to get a good night’s sleep.

The new job typing the court transcripts basically requires a complete re-learning of everything that I have ever learned working in law firms for my entire working life. Things like capitalisation of “Court”, “Subpoena”, “Affidavit”, “Exhibit” – things that come naturally to me – is not the right way at the new place I am working at. Unfortunately, I keep making the same stupid mistakes and I am finding it extremely difficult to do things the right way. I feel like I’ve been institutionalised for the last 6 years and I now have to re-wire my brain for this new job.

The new job, though, was nothing compared to looking after Smokey by myself. I had never previously owned a dog before, not even when I was a kid, and I found it to be a huge responsibility (almost a burden) – I felt like I suddenly had a baby that was dependent on me. I was pedantic about making sure he had fresh water and a bowl of biscuits before I went to work. Smokey is after all Tim’s dog as well, and if anything happened to Smokey it would be my fault. After Tim went back to Sydney after that first week he was here with me, Smokey sort of represented Tim in a funny way. During that first week that we arrived in Tasmania (while Tim was here helping me settle in), Smokey had jumped over the fence three times. Poor Smokey has had a hard life so far, and he is not yet even 2 years old. He was placed at the dog’s home after his first owners couldn’t keep him. He spent 3 or 4 months at the dog’s home before Tim’s friend took ownership of him. Then Tim’s friend only had him for 4 months before he ended up with us in a completely different environment than what he is used to. Smokey is a classic city dog and had never seen horses, cows, possums or chickens before. Next door is a paddock with a few horses in it and unfortunately our fence was just not high enough and the distraction of the horses proved too much for him. As a result of his constant escaping, I had to get a new (higher) fence put in at a cost of close to $7,000. Fortunately, the money has been worth it as Smokey hasn’t even tried to escape since the fence went up

Tim found out soon after returning to Sydney after that first week he was here with me that the prospects of getting a transfer with his job at Australia Post are pretty slim. It seems that the postie jobs in here in Tasmania are very tightly held. It’s very rare that someone leaves Australia Post in Tasmania, unless they retire. And even then there are 10 posties already in the queue waiting for transfers from Sydney. So Tim’s chances of getting a transfer were promptly flushed down the toilet. After a couple of months of separation, he decided to quit his job and move down here with me, which of course was a massive relief for me, especially considering the rawkus neighbours partying every weekend. Tim has now been here for 3.5 weeks and I feel so at home and I can sleep more peacefully at night now. All we need now is for Tim to get a job. He has applied for 3 or 4 jobs (all different kinds of jobs from cleaning to electricity meter reading) and hasn’t heard back from any of them just yet. Everyone we talk to seems pretty confident that there will be something for him.

My show ran from the 19^th to the 24^th of August. While the show has been on I’ve not had any chance to help Tim move furniture or boxes to the storage unit. I’ve had to get up at 6am and stay up until after midnight collecting boxes of stock from the old house, checking the float and making sure I had everything for the next day’s stock at the show. The show has completely shattered me physically – my brain has been like mush, my legs and feet ache so much that I can hardly walk as I leave on the way back to the car. For the past 4 weeks now I think I have been suffering from moderate stress. Because there is so much to remember for each day I find it difficult to hold a thought or to concentrate for longer than a minute. The last 4 nights we have been sleeping at the granny flat and I have had only one decent night’s sleep. I thought I’d be freed up to do some cleaning at our old house on Tuesday, the day after the show, and maybe help pack away some of Tim’s remaining items but it took me almost 4 hours just to put the boxes containing stock from the show back into storage. 

Tim has started work at his new job as a bicycle postman with Australia Post, so he’s now working two jobs starting at 5am and finishing his postie job at 2pm. He’s been rushing back from work to pack his stuff and get it into storage before they close at 5:30 each night.

To compound all this madness, a box containing my purse (with about $180 cash in it), my sunglasses and my $500 camera with photos of my stand at the show was stolen when I was putting the show stock back into storage at Storage King on Monday. If only my purse and camera wasn’t stolen I think this whole experience would seem a whole lot better. I had some really good photos on my camera of my stand at the show which I hadn’t had chance to download onto my computer – I’m so sad that I’ve now lost those photos forever. I was really looking forward to showing my mum and dad the photos and putting the them up on my website and up here on our blog. As for losing my purse, I haven’t even had the chance to cancel my credit card or EFTPOS cards yet because we don’t have the internet or a phone line at the granny flat yet. 

The storage unit now looks like a disorganised second hand furniture shop. It is still full of furniture and stuff in boxes that we need to go through and really work out if it is worthwhile hanging onto certain things. Perhaps at the end of our simple living exercise which is the granny flat we’ll come to the conclusion that maybe we don’t need to take all those pieces of furniture with us anyway. It will save a few thousand dollars in transporting the stuff. Plus, eventually the plan is to get new stuff. Tim has heaps of boxes that he still has to go through and sell some more stuff on ebay. I’m very concerned that he won’t be able to find the time to get all that stuff sorted out and sold and we’ll be carting it with us to Tasmania *oh god please no …*

Because we don’t have the internet or the phone connected at the granny flat I can’t reply to emails that people have sent me, although I can download them on iphone but for some reason my stupid iphone won’t send replies. So I’m going to have some outraged customers before too long …

Sometimes I think the better option would have been to just move straight down to Tasmania and avoided this move. If we had just gone straight down there, I would have been able to easily get a job at my preferred law firm there because they were looking for staff at that point. But I have to keep reminding myself that we couldn’t have moved down there anyway because we already signed a lease to have a tenant in the house for 8 months. Also, I really wanted to go through with the show especially seeing though I had already paid for it and they don’t give refunds. Plus, Tim’s chances of getting a job down there would have been almost zero if he hadn’t started work with Australia Post. At least there is a chance he can get an internal transfer down to Tasmania. I hope at the end of this we’ll look back and know that it was all worth it.

We have now seen about 7 or 8 different rental premises and they have all been dumps – and the outrageous thing is that in this current rental market they can now charge $400+ per week rent for these dumps and people will willingly pay that! People are desperate at the moment. We have so far filled in rental application forms for 3 places and with two of those applicatoins we were declined. The third we were approved but we decided not to go ahead with that place because it was a unit (apartment) without a balcony. I hope that we don’t end up regretting knocking that one back.

Today we went out to see 5 different places, both houses and units. We thought that we would have better luck pursuing units because the rent is less than houses and we thought our chances would be better at units. Obvously moving from a 2 bedroom house to a 1 bedroom unit we’ll be fairly cramped so we thought we could get (another) storage unit and put all of Tim’s collections and some of the larger pieces of furniture in there. One of the units that we went to look at today was a one bedroom unit for $230 a week. It must have been about 30 square metres in total – and no balcony. If you want a unit for a balcony you’ll have to pay $290+.

The other unit that we went to look at we didn’t even get a chance to get in the door – there must have been 30 people queing up to get into the unit. The queue started at the front door of the actual unit on the first floor, wound down the internal steps of the building and was spilling outside the front security door. I just can’t believe that we are in this position having to compete with these plebs. So we joined the end of the queue and then all of a sudden all the people started coming down the stairs and they started to leave. The real estate agent had basically told everyone that the viewing time is up and he has to go to his next open house, so only about 10 people got to actually go inside and see the place, everyone else including us basically had their time wasted. What a joke. Apparently this is happening all over Sydney.

The last place we went to see today was this place which was advertised as a one bedroom granny flat – yes that’s how desperate we are to find somewhere to live.

When we got there we found that the granny flat wasn’t really a granny flat but more of a refurbished garage in someone’s front yard which had been turned into a studio unit. Oh and its technically not a one bedroom because there’s no actual door closing off the bedroom from the lounge/dining area. Oh and there’s no laundry in it. But the thing is, the rent is $200 per week, its got a little fenced off courtyard and it is in good condition. At least we know that hundreds of different people haven’t previously been living here over the years, unlike some of the houses and units we have looked at so far. So if we only have to pay $200 a week in rent and the storage unit is $145 a week then we aren’t paying too much more rent than what we are currently paying. As for the downsizing from a house with a big backyard to a little studio with a paved courtyard – I think for $200 a week we could put up with it for at least 6 months, save some money along the way and also keep up with our mortgage payments. We filled out our application form for the place and I just have to go and hand it in first thing Monday morning. Actually we both really want to get the place so we have told the agent that we are happy to pay 6 months rent in advance for this place. Oh my god I hope we get it – this is the best opportunity we have had throughout this whole process.