Well after five months of looking at houses and thinking about things and trying to decide what is the best thing to do, we now own a house in Tasmania.

Horses belong to next door neighbour

Our beautiful garden

We had been looking at buying a house in Sydney (in the Sutherland shire, 40 minutes south of Sydney), but even out that far we would still be paying $600,000 for a decent-sized house. Plus, the travel to and from the city I thought would really irk me, seeing as though I work in the city.

How did we come to the conclusion of purchasing a house in Tasmania? Well to be honest it was all my idea *folds arms proudly* – but it took my boyfriend of 8 years, Tim, some months to come around to the idea. When I mentioned it to him back in February 08 he was not impressed with the idea at all. Although he agreed that Tasmania was a nice place, he didn’t see it as a place to actually live in and an ultimatum was given that if I want to move to Tasmania then I’d be moving by myself. I spent a lot of weeks thinking about what I would do – it wasn’t worth the break up of our relationship, so I agreed with him that we should just look for houses in Sydney.

So we started looking. Each weekend going round to open homes, checking things out, what we can get for our money etc. After 3 weeks of open houses it occurred to us that we couldn’t get that much for our money’s worth. At that time Tim’s mother and father had just come back from a 3 week trip to Tasmania. They brought back real estate magazines which showed lovely old (and very new) houses, 3 and 4 bedrooms plus for the same price that you’d pay for a 2 bedroom fibro shack in Sydney. I had a flick through one of the magazines and said to Tim “Maybe we’re doing the wrong thing.” It was basically at that point that we decided to start looking at houses in Tasmania.

Over the course of the following few weekends, we’d take a flight from Sydney down to Tasmania. We started in areas near Launceston. Lovely areas such as Deloraine, Railton, Devenport and Elizabethtown. Then the next weekend we’d fly down again, checking out houses closer to Hobart such as Primrose Sands, Opossum Bay (40 minutes drive south east of Hobart) and then onto Cygnet and Huonville (25 minutes south west of Hobart in the Huon Valley).

One particular house in Huonville that we looked at caught our attention, it was quite drab inside but the outside was just so sweet, the gardens were amazing and the location was hard to beat (just a minute’s walk to the main street in Huonville). We went back to look at the house a second time the following weekend. We got a builder to go through the house with us and provide us with a quote for how much it would cost to get the inside looking sweet. A week and a half later we made an offer on the house. Negotiations went on for about a week and then we settled on a final price. That was about 28 days ago and the house settled just this past Monday 30 June 08. Yay!

We won’t be moving into the house just yet. The company that I run has a major show coming up that I need to organise and also we have some furniture and other posessions that we need to get rid of. But we’ll rent it out to help us pay the mortgage for a while. And then when we’re ready to move down, away we’ll go!