Settling In

Posted at 6:40 PM, Wednesday, May 2, 2007

The question that we've been asked five times as often as any other is "How are you settling in?" Since we've now been here for nearly eight months, the question has merited re-wording and is now, "Are you completely settled?" To their credit, the people who ask us seem genuinely interested in the answer, and are not just asking to be polite. Nor do they seem completely invested in getting a positive response. Which is good, because my answer these days is "mostly."

Along with all other South Australians, I was immensely thankful for the nearly three inches of rain that fell over four soggy days last week. To give a sense of perspective, especially to those of you living in my old stomping grounds in western Pennsylvania, the total rainfall for the previous seven months of our Australian residency was 3.5 inches. Last week's drenching was three times the normal average of rain for April and was apparently perfectly timed for all those enterprising farmers who had seeded their fields in the hopes that some water would magically appear. Like many others in South Australia, I was horrified to discover that virtually no mechanism exists to capture all of that precious water before it flows out to the ocean. The Adelaide Advertiser reports that Adelaide looses as much freshwater from its drains and rivers into the sea each year as it takes from the threatened and increasingly unreliable Murray River. You'd think that someone might have done something about this on a large scale by now, but at the moment, it's only the individual homeowners and farmers with rainwater tanks who take the trouble to collect the rain when it falls. Several members of Beit Shalom depend entirely on rainwater for their household water use, and a lot more have rainwater tanks available for watering their gardens.

I think I could wholeheartedly say that I feel happily acclimatized to life in Australia were it not for our housing situation. Everything is terrific, except when it isn't. We are delighted to have a large three bedroom home with a good-sized yard in a nice location. We have a huge shed which hopefully can one day be transformed into a workshop for Bobby once we figure out where to put all the stuff that's sitting in there. We enjoy the elegant touches in our 1930s-era home, particularly the plasterwork on the ceiling and the polished wood floors. Even though it's hot in the summer and cold in the winter, we like it here.

Of course, we remain renters, and in Australia that means that our house is periodically inspected. We receive a letter from the real estate agency that manages the property informing us that they will be calling at a certain time the following week. There follows several harried days of straightening, vacuuming, washing, scrubbing, dusting, sweeping, raking, and pruning in anticipation of the property manager's arrival. We conduct a search-and-destroy mission for fingerprints and other markings on the wall. And, of course, we resolve that we will keep our house this clean and perfect always so that inspection day will be just a routine visit.

I find the process incredibly infantilizing. We are selling the home we've owned in Ambridge for seven years and consider ourselves to be fairly responsible people who know how to treat a house. We also paid a $2200 bond when we moved in to guarantee the condition of the home when we left it. Having a property manager call on us periodically to make sure we're not trashing the place seems like a not-so-subtle suggestion that they're just biding their time until we move out and a more desirable tenant moves in.

In our lease, the real estate agency notified us that they would be inspecting our house once each three months. We had our first inspection in late December and have been inspected four additional times since, including three times in the last two months. The property manager came in early March to look around, and then a mere three weeks later we received notification that the home's overseas' owner would be coming to visit on an additional inspection. That inspection really threw us into a panic. I stayed up until 1:30 a.m. cleaning and then got up at 6:00 a.m. to finish any last-minute details. As it turned out, the home's owner was more interested in looking at the cracks in the walls than at how clean the sinks were. (Just about all older homes in Adelaide have cracks, since concrete foundations are a relatively recent innovation.) But how could we predict what she was going to be looking for?

Our fifth and latest inspection was today, and this time I was so stressed out by the whole process that I left Bobby in charge and went in to the office. The inspection itself took all of five minutes, and apparently the inspector barely peeked into some of the rooms. We have tried in vain to find out why we are being inspected so often, and we haven't even received a checklist to let us know what they are looking for. At lesat we've been promised that they will leave us alone until August, and we certainly intend to keep them to this promise.

I expect I could approach this process more calmly if we hadn't had such a difficult time finding a home in the first place. It certainly doesn't help to know that Adelaide currently has the tightest rental market in Australia, with a vacancy rate of under 1%. Which means that we won't be looking to relocate any time soon despite the frequent inspections.