Saturday 2 April 2011

Photo Home..



118 Kentish Road, Kiels Mountain, Sunshine Coast, QLD 4559. AUSTRALIA!!!!!!!

Photo Rewind....

That's all folks........x

So here we are. We did it. It's all done. We have a house, cars, jobs, mobile phones.. Do we feel normal? Like bollocks! How on Earth could we. We get woken by the Kookaburras laughing in the morning, I get to surf before work in boardshorts, there are tables of fruit by the side of the road with honesty boxes to pay for it. Our nearest neighbour is 200m away, we live down the end of a no through road, we have a bloody drive! Kym's journey to work gives her simultaneous views of both the whole coast and the Baroon lake from the ridge she drives along, and she's experiencing a new found enthusiasm for hairdressing inspired no doubt by Stevie English in Sydney and an encouraging boss. My boss surfs! And most importantly of all we're still madly in love.

Happy? You betcha. Now you lot could make us even happier by coming to visit. We've got two spare rooms and open arms. And we can say thankyou to all of you personally for collectively keeping your hands on our backs and giving us little shoves of encouragement when we needed it.


Thanks for reading folks, I honestly don't think we'll keep the blog going but you can still follow us on Twitter if you're that way inclined @youngdecorator and @kymearse or Facebook us or even Skype us at youngtrippers.








PS. Given the opportunity we'd do it all again tomorrow xxx

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Photo Excited much?

Home..

You know, they say (them again) you make your own luck. I seriously think we must have a secret factory or maybe it works on some sort of kharmic basis, one really shitty bit of bad luck ensures you many smaller good lucks? Does that mean that lots of little bad lucks means you get one big good luck? Or does it just depend on what you require at the time? Who measures it? Anyway I kinda hope that we've had our share of shitty big bad lucks and that this run of little good lucks are making up for it and when it balances out please don't put us back on that good luck bad luck seesaw I'll be happy with normal life thankyou.

What I'm getting at is that I made a call to a car advert in the local paper and spoke to an English bloke who was extremely helpful in that he persuaded me not to go for the car he was selling but that he goes to the Brisbane motor auctions twice a week as a dealer and if I wanted to accompany him and buy a car at the auction he would charge me $500. Cool. So we head to his house, jump in his car, drive to Brisbane look at stacks of cars, get a good idea of prices and come back empty handed. Two days later with Kym at work I headed down with Simon again and this time drive home in a 1995 BMW 318i. Jobs a goodun. Kym loves it and by all accounts we got a bargain.

Just going back a bit.. While we were in Canberra at Jen's house we did a bit of rental property browsing on the internet. Our immideate thought was bugger we gonna have to revise the size of the house we want, but after due consideration we came to the conclusion that we'd happily live a bit inland and get an extra room for the same price we'd be paying for a house closer to the beach. Serendipituosly Kym's job also turns out to be much further inland than we originally envisaged. Well we did find somewhere we both agreed on. An older style Queenslander (single storey timber construction on stilts) set in about an acre 10km back from the coast and surrounded by bush (woods to us) and a macadamia orchard. It looked great on the web. We gave the real estate people a call more to ask what the proceedure was than anything, the house in question was still for rent and she suggested we come and have a look at as there were people interested. We were still in Canberra! As it turns out the house wasn't going to be availale for another month but we didn't get our hopes up, at this stage we were still thinking it would be at least a month before we got to the Sunny Coast. This didn't stop Kym printing off a picture of the house and pinning it to the dashboard!

Where was I? Oh yeah we got the car and spoke to the agents for the house again, guess what... you already knew where this was going didn't you? Yep it was still available. Yep we could go and have a look. Yep we loved it. Yep our application was successful. The only down side was that because we'd motored it up the country it was still two weeks before we could get it. Two weeks in a one room transit cabin on a campsite..Oh no course not, cos the seesaw still had more luck to go to balance the big shitty bit on the other side. Kym's boss insisted we move into her house for the two weeks free of charge. No kidding.

With Kym working it gave me plenty of opportunity to get loads of boring important stuff done. Organise delivery of container to house, arrange electricity supply, sort out internet connection, buy a washing machine and fridge (two birds with one stone off some mad dude from the paper for $300!), work out how to find 3months advance rent (only one of us working and part time at that) and that didn't include the deposit. Financial juggling successful (thanks in large to Richard Bransons lovely Virgin money having a promotion on credit: 0% until October, Cheers Rich.) I even managed to apply for a load of jobs. In fact I applied for 6 jobs in total sending out the requested CV and covering letter and we're not talking out of my league stuff like plastic surgery or summit. How many replies? Of any kind at all?... Non, zip, nada, nul. Not even for the friggin lawn mower salesman.

Seesaw still in our favour. Got a call from a painter and decorator who had been given my number by another painter that I had rang speculatively. He was looking for me! We met in the sea at the local beach and discussed wages and hours while dodging waves then sealed it with a beer and a picnic on the grass with his wife and two of her friends. I started the next day. The seesaw has got to be getting straight by now surely?

Friday of the same week we both had the day off and met the delivery truck with our new keys to our new house at 118 Kentish Road, Kiels Mountain, 4559, QLD. I can say categorically that 2 1/2 years to the day that we waved goodbye to our belongings and after almost 2 years and 18 countries of amazing travelling, this one was definitely right up there. Friday March the 4th 2011 our journey came to an end. We spent the day variously laughing, crying, hugging, remebering and at the end of the day getting pissed. We had the whole weekend to spend in our own house with all our own stuff with out having to climb ladders, put clothes on or turn the music down.

Photo So much stuff.

Photo Pickfords have been great

Photo Moving in.

There.

Now as I mentioned previously Kym had spoken to the owner of a salon in the Sunny coast hinterland in a town called Maleny. Yvette sounded as excited as Kym about meeting so the interview was arranged. Maleny is about 45mins inland and up in the clouds. It's a beautiful old town a bit Glastonbury-ish, you know, lot's of organic shops and co-ops not to mention crystals, drums and healers of all types and it's also where a lot of wealthy people live!

Of course she got the job, why wouldn't you employ a gorgeous, talented worldly wise, top stylist? The only problem was we were living in a roof tent on a camp site and Yvette wanted Kym to start pretty much there and then. The campsite we were on did have small cabin kinda things so we moved into one of them, unpacked and off Kym went to work. So weird for both of us. Two years down the road and here we are on the Sunshine Coast, living in a cabin, and Kym going to work. I wasn't idle. We needed another car, the campsite was down the hills nearer the coast and taking Kym to and picking up from work was going to be expensive. We also needed to find somewhere more suitable to live and repatriate our belongings that have been in storage in Brisbane and of course I needed a job too.

Photo Coffs Harbour

Nearly there..

With prospects ahead and money running out we kinda skipped it up the East Coast pretty quickly. A fabulous few days with yet more friends, Galit and Baz in Byron Bay and a bit of surf and a bit of shop for Kym (Galit is a clothing designer). Before we knew it we were at the Sunshine Coast, our final destination!