Finally we found a place we love and want to move into in my dream location. I really hope we get approved for it, but we won’t know until Wednesday next week. It’s about 10 minutes walk from the beach, it’s well soundproofed. The garage doesn’t have a silly post in the middle like this house which makes me happier about parking the car, and I can’t reverse the car out of the garage in this house..
The place is a little smaller in some ways, we’re losing a bedroom and a bathroom. But we’ve never really needed two bathrooms anyway, and the extra bedroom is currently full of The Other Half’s hoarded junk.
It is amazing considering the last time we moved I made him chuck out heaps of junk because we had to pay a lot more to move it interstate. But he’s collected another bunch of it. I may be a digital packrat, but he is a junk packrat.
There’s something I never mentioned to you guys about this house we’re in now. We moved in here in February of 2006, and ever since we have been receiving mail for the previous tenants. It gets old fast. Really old. We would collect it up and once a month mark it all return to sender and put it in the post box. However it still keeps turning up, a year and six months later.
Then, we started to see some strange mail. We don’t open it, but you know those envelopes you can see through? A letter came from the council about their dogs not being registered and that they would be fined. Then we started to get letters from companies chasing them for money. Being the intuitive person that I am – and also able to foresee events coming to me as a surprise from time to time, I said to the other half – next there will be bailiffs knocking on the door.
That finally happened a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t here but they left a note wanting to talk to us about repossessing our motorbike. We don’t have a motorbike. I rang the guy and explained they didn’t live here, and we then called the rental company, who as usual were absolutely useless and wouldn’t lift a finger to help us. So, we turned to the internet.
It is amazing what you can find out about people just by knowing their name. Our previous tenants own a pharmacy here in town. It’s not the one we use, thankfully. I say that because I spent an entire WEEK cleaning this house before we moved into it. The real estate agents idea of clean and my idea of clean are two different things – it’s not that I was being a clean freak, it is that the house was utterly filthy but you had to look close to see it.
We now know where they live – and we know that house is up for sale and nobody is living there. But at least we can redirect the people looking for money to the pharmacy.
So, I’m counting down the days.. will we be moving? Or not? I’ll let you know as soon as I know. ;)
I also used to get mail for the previous tenants, after about a year I started writing “return to sender” in red texta instead of blue biro along with “No longer living here please update your database” in really big letters. Only had to do that for about 6 months. Hope you get your new home and that it’s everything you wished for.
Good luck on the new place. Living near the water will make a world of difference.
When we moved into this rental last year we had a stack of mail in the mail box to go through. A STACK! I would have figured the mail man figured out what to do. It was at least four difference tenants and I went through and threw out the junk and put return to sender on everything else. We still get stuff sometimes but I throw it in the trash. Sorry, but they haven’t lived here in ages and if they haven’t changed their bank accounts by now they are in trouble.
And I’ll go with you on the clean thing. We spent 6 hours clenaing before we moved in and it still wasn’t that great. GRR!
Oh, that’s creepy. Really creepy. We get a lot of Christian Scientist mailings and toy catalogues for our previous occupants, which is just not so bad…
Wow, I hope you get the house. It sounds wonderful. Good on you for tracking down the former tenant. That should give the next renters some relief.
Hugs,
Laurie