Well, I did it. I can finally put a tick against the biggest thing on my list.

Well, I did it. I can finally put a tick against the biggest thing on my list. It’s been on the list every year, without fail. And each year I have wondered if this will be it, this will be the year for it.

I’ve had great intentions for a long time, even occasionally done some research into a narrowed down list of various suburbs throughout, well, Australia. But in hindsight, I have to say I was half-hearted. In fact, kind of lame.

I never really did much about it before. It was kind of like being annoyed you haven’t won the big one in lotto, but then admitting you hadn’t actually bought a ticket. You know the feeling, “Ohhh, I would SO have picked those numbers!” But you didn’t.

Well, I’ve been like that for a while in the “property game” – all good intentions but no action. But that all changed recently ...  I have to confess, I did only the littlest bit of research. I was intending to do more, I spent three weekends looking at various houses and then BANG.

There she was. Everything I’d wanted.

Well actually I didn’t know it was what I wanted. I thought I just wanted to buy an investment property that could be quickly rented out with minimum fuss, and there I would begin a new phase in my life as PROPERTY MOGUL. (You gotta think big!) So really it was more like BANG there she was, nothing that I was looking for.

The fact she was already sold was admittedly a hurdle, but in a rush of activity that left little time to contemplate the sheer enormity and – well, some would say stupidity – of the implications of what I was doing, it was all done.

Lawyers did their bit, agent did his, the bank was involved, I was suitably nervous for a few days and then there was champagne. Not as painful as I thought.  I picked up the keys only three weeks later (after quite a long drive I might add) and thought how “quaint”: they were three inches long and looked like they belonged in a museum.

I had not only decided to buy a run-down, three-bedroom, four-fireplace, double brick 100+-year-old cottage that brings new meaning to the term “renovator’s delight”, but I had decided I simply must live there as well. There was something magical about the expanse of lucerne paddocks, the views to the mountains and the cows at the bottom fence, that told me I had to pick-up everything immediately and move. 

So I welcomed in the New Year in my new-found world of simple perfection. I sat in the sweltering heat in my yard, under the Hills hoist, with my feet submerged in the blow up plastic pool (some comfort to the half dozen still bleeding holes from which I’d extracted the bindis), a plastic tumbler of champers and an incredible feeling of accomplishment, and I toasted in the new year. 

I’m not fussed by the outside loo, although I’m convinced the resident blue tongue takes great joy in sticking his tail through the great cracks in the concrete floor to make me think he’s a snake, and I’m not the least concerned that you literally can fall through the floorboards in the kitchen. I’m not worried the hot water system has only one temperature – boiling – and I’m not phased by the salmon, apple green and mustard paint the original owner seemed to favour.

Because I know I’ll fix it all. This is the project I have been longing for. This is what I’ve wanted to do but been too nervous to try. I’ve tried waiting for the right person to do it with, procrastinated about how much you need to do it, used the fact I work in the city as an excuse not to do it – and in the end, the right place turned up and none of that mattered. I just can’t believe I didn’t do it earlier.

So if you’ve had something on your list for a long time, why not just do it?   It might be much more rewarding than you thought it would be, and maybe not as frightening as you thought it could be.  Then again, I haven’t started the renovations.

Till next month! 

Abby x