Jason and Kirsten in Melbourne

One of the main things we’ve needed to do since returning to Australia is to buy furniture to fill our empty flat. We sold all of the little furniture we owned in the UK before moving over, so we had nothing to start with – quite an undertaking.

The flip side of this was that we had a blank slate to start with. Given that we both decided that we were too old to be living in yet another flat with Ikea furniture, we made the big decision to put a little more effort into our choices this time and get something more … designed.

Two big purchases had to be top on our list – couches and dining table.

We ended up choosing the couches themselves really easily. After discounting the options at mainstream places, we found a great little furniture store only a short walk from our home – Blend on Smith St. They stocked mainly couches from Jardan, a Melbourne-based furniture manufacturer. We immediately warmed to their range and after a visit out to some random industrial estate to see their showroom we decided on two mid-century designs. Job done? Not by a long shot.

Couches such as these don’t come in set fabric or coverings – we had to choose our own. And I don’t mean choose from a list – we had to choose from ANY fabric. This was a great chance to really put ‘ourselves’ into the design and/or a great chance to completely stuff up some really nice furniture. But we figured that great design involves taking risks, so we loaded up on interior design magazines and got to roaming around the fabric houses.

To cut a long story short, its been about 6 weeks of looking (including once week where we were so exasperated that we couldn’t face seeing a fabric swatch and had to take a break). We finally decided on a colour combination (contrasting charcoal wool for one and a pattered light blue for the other). Are we confident our choice will work? God no…but in 6-8 weeks we’ll get to see.

In between all of this was the rather easier (but still strained) table decision. Some good friends of our bought a table from Mark Tuckey – a Melbourne-based wood guy who is famed for his reclaimed wood tables. Our isn’t reclaimed wood – it is a pale sand-blasted oregon with a rust and black h-frame metal base; almost the polar opposite of what our friends bought. Like the couches, these are also custom made so it will take 8-10 weeks to see if we made the right decision here.

Of course, this is just the beginning. Dining table chairs will need to follow soon, but some mid-century advertising-as-art has started to catch my eye also. Stay tuned – pics will (eventually) follow and you can make up your own mind if we completely botched our first stab at designer furnishings.

Well, we’ve finally found a place to live!

View from M&A's Apartment on Flickr

Next week we’ll be moving out from Marcus and Amber’s CBD pad into our very own rental place – a two bedroom warehouse conversion flat in Collingwood. It seems like its taken forever, but I guess three weeks isn’t too bad. I am very relieved to have that part of the puzzle sorted out, but it was easier than we had anticipated – we got the first place we applied for despite both not having jobs, and they didn’t even take us up on our offer of paying rent in advance.

It feels like a bit of a blur, especially given the massive number of places we’ve been to inspect during this process (twenty plus, easily). I had to re-read the advertisement to remember the details of the place once we were notified that we were successful – we’d only seen the place in a quick ten-minute inspection along with ten or more other couples. I can recall that the bedrooms each have wardrobes (built-in in one room and walk-in in another), there’s a combined shower/toilet/laundry room, a galley kitchen and a big open space for living/dining/etc.

The location is pretty handy – close to the good bits of Fitzroy, but off the main road. There’s a Woolworths supermarket nearby (walking distance), plus its about a five minute walk to my cousin’s cafe. A squash place is about 15 mins walk away, and the tram nearby takes us into the city in about 15 mins too.

There are some downsides – the place is not air-conditioned (though it does have big windows which I’m hoping will sufficiently mitigate that issue) and it doesn’t boast a dishwasher. This will be the first house in about 10 years that I’ve lived in without one, so I’m interested to see how I will cope. It also has some particularly stinky tenants at the minute, which we may need to deal with via a professional cleaner before we move in.

As soon as we left the real estate agent’s offices after signing the lease, talk turned to the next steps: getting the internet connected (very important for an unemployed person), buying appliances (fridge, washing machine, etc) and furniture (we don’t even have a bed to sleep on when we move in) and so on. We’ve only got a couple of days for all of this to somehow come together before we head back to Perth for a weekend wedding.

If all goes well, Kirsten will be starting work as soon as we get back from Perth, leaving me to focus on making purchases (and getting a job of my own). So its all go!

We always knew that we were doing things the hard way by moving to Melbourne without first securing jobs, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. It was especially relevant for me as I could probably have arranged a transfer with my previous employer, but we thought in doing it from scratch we’d have a larger range of jobs to choose from, we’d be able to compare between jobs more readily and we’d have access to agents to help us get a better understanding of local pay rates etc etc.

Queue by Paul Russell on Flickr

While all of these factors are valid, it still seems like a hard slog visiting agents, attending interview after interview (me) or schmoozing with ex-colleagues (Kirsten) to find a job. What’s worse is that not having a job makes it that bit harder to secure a decent rental property, and in the ultra-competitive Melbourne rental market its a pretty big factor.

We’ve been to rental home openings with long queues of over 25 people cramming into the 15 minute slot to have a look and we’ve heard stories of others where there were even more. While we are happy staying with Marcus and Amber, we can’t stay here forever and the pressure to find a place to stay is probably bigger than that of finding a job. We’ve had a look at quite a few, but many are tiny – it doesn’t seem right moving to Australia and living in a smaller place than we did in London!

Between visiting properties and doing all the job-related meetings we both seem to have full-time jobs (albeit poorly paid ones).

The other side of the coin is that we have only been here for 10 days, which isn’t a lot in the scheme of things. In fact, our planning and budgeting has allowed for significantly more time between finding jobs so we can avoid having to take the first job that comes along and concentrate on finding the one that suits us best. But it just feels like 10 days is a long time when finding a house or a job is all you have to do all day every day.

Having said that, things are looking up on both the job and house fronts. We’ve finally found one place we’d be happy to live in and with a few more viewings over the next couple of days we hope to have a place lined up soon. Similarly, we’ve both had some very positive progress on the job fronts.

The Hunt continues…

It’s probably not going to be the last thing that annoys me about the move, but I have to ask – why are things so EXPEN$IVE in Australia? With our dollar valued at 90% of a US dollar, shouldn’t prices reflect this? Are Australians just being ripped off?

Today, I was shopping for business shirts and frustrated with the lack of sizes available in every store I visited. Mens’ necks sizes are allowed to vary from person to person in Australia, but not arm lengths apparently. I was resigned to this though – previous experience told me that variable sizing for shirts (and jeans!) is not something that goes on in Australia for whatever reason, and we all need to walk around with ill-fitting clothes. I had made my mind up to buy one shirt for now, and get the rest online from a country where they realise that people sometimes have different length arms.

Campers on Flickr

But what annoyed me most was having to pay $100 for the one brand of shirt that offered a little choice in arm size; the quality was appalling. Really decent shirts in the UK cost a lot less and you can ALWAYS get one in the size you want. Its how things should be!

I thought I’d walk around make sure no other shops sold shirts with variable sleeve lengths (they didn’t) when I came upon the Camper shop – the only one in Melbourne, apparently. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I love Camper shoes; I currently own 5 pairs. I went inside to find that the prices were even crazier than with business shirts. Shoes that were £85-£100 in the UK were selling for $290! For that price, I could buy a pair of shoes at retail cost in the UK, ship them over individually and still make a ‘profit’ of over $100 on every pair sold. What’s worse is that I saw another shop with a very small selection of Campers selling the same shoes for $330.

When I got home, I ordered my business shirts online from the UK – 3 shirts, all of higher quality than what I bought today and an exact sizing fit for a grand total of £75 (yes, including international shipping). That works out to around $130. For THREE shirts.

People are not getting a fair deal over here. Makes me want to go into business…

Update:
Just to add some balance to this discussion, I will list the stuff that I have found that is good value in Australia:

• Dry cleaning (5 shirts washed and pressed for $13 is the best I’ve seen so far)
• Sushi Rolls (these $2.50 snacks are just awesome)
• Suits (seem to be a little cheaper than other places)

If I find anything else, I will add it.

The View on Flickr

Well, we landed in Melbourne yesterday evening – the start of our new life in Melbourne. Our South East Asian holiday was a blast; 7 weeks of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, but now its time to get back to real life.

Right now we are staying with our friends, Marcus and Amber, who have an amazing apartment right in Melbourne’s CBD. Its a fantastic base for the things we’ll be doing in the next couple of weeks (job and rental house hunting), so we couldn’t ask for more.

As for our first day in Melbourne, there was not much to report. Other than my interview with a local recruitment agent (about 5 mins walk away) and a quick trip to the grocery store we barely left the house. We’ve both had our heads hunched over computers, finalising CV’s, looking at real estate websites and generally getting to the admin that we need to get our lives back from holiday mode into real life.

We’re pumped to be in the market for mundane things like vacuum cleaners and washing machines – its been a while since this stuff has been on our agenda. Conversely, the thought of setting up a whole life and the costs associated with furnishing an entire house are both daunting.

Having said that, we are very excited – the chance to create a new life from scratch doesn’t come along that often (not that our old one was bad…). Tomorrow and the rest of the week will be much the same; more job hunting, the start of the (possibly long) search for a rental property and more life admin. I can’t wait…