Here’s the short version: We bought a house in Adelaide (photos at the end of the post). We sold our house in Sydney on Saturday. We’re renting in Sydney for another couple of years. Then we’re moving to Adelaide.
Here’s the longer version: After a very eventful and unique second half to 2013, we were looking forward to a relaxing Christmas an New Year period. What transpired was actually quite the opposite!
Back in 2011 we decided to move to Adelaide in South Australia (if you’ve never been Down Under, it’s about a 15 hour drive from Sydney). I grew up in Adelaide but ever since Jerusha and I got married we have lived in Castle Hill in the suburbs of Sydney. Jerusha has aunts, uncles and cousins in Adelaide, so has visited many times, but has never lived there.
We love all our family and friends in Sydney and so it was an incredibly difficult decision to reach. My parents had received a voluntary missionary assignment to be a Mission President (to look after about 150 young Mormon missionaries in an area) and were waiting to find out where in the world they would be assigned. Everything was falling into place and we planned to move into their house in Adelaide when they left.
Then we found out they had been assigned to Sydney and would be living in Carlingford, only 10 minutes from us! So with our kids having 4 grandparents close by, we changed our plans and decided to stay in Sydney…at least for another 3 years. As it turned out their assignment to Sydney ended up being an additional blessing to us because they were close by when Ethan became sick.
I always wondered if we would in fact end up moving to South Australia. The longer we stayed in Sydney the more entrenched the kids and all of us would become. Having lived in Sydney since we were married for almost 10 years and Jerusha having lived most of her life here, we already felt very entrenched! But we decided we’d look at the Adelaide move in 2015 and see what was happening and if it felt right then. With all of Ethan’s treatments it hadn’t been on our mind at all.
A few months ago in mid November 2013 I had the impression to jump on the real estate website one night and I started looking at what was for sale in Adelaide. One particular property stood out to me as being quite unique – it was very close to the suburbs where I grew up, but was on several acres of land. More space for the kids to run around and play has always been something that we’ve wanted for our family, but hasn’t ever been a possibility in Sydney.
So I made some inquiries with the agent, had my sister and her family go to an open house, still all the while not really expecting it to go anywhere. But the more Jerusha and I spoke about it, the more interesting it became to us. The whole process of discussing, pondering and praying over the decision was a very unifying one for us. After about 3 weeks it hadn’t sold yet and so we organised for Jerusha to fly down to Adelaide for a day to check it out. This was still while Ethan’s chemo treatments were going on so it was hardly ideal! But as Jerusha’s mum pointed out, the best opportunities don’t always come at the best times.
If she liked it then I was happy to push ahead and make an offer, mainly on the basis that we could offer roughly what we thought our house in Sydney would sell for. If she didn’t like it we were going to leave it. As it turned out she liked it more than she expected and saw some potential in it (read: more landscaping, gardening and handyman jobs for me). After some back and forth we had an offer accepted.
All of a sudden what had just been theory up until that point was now reality…we had to sell our house in Sydney. And quickly. Up until we found out that our offer had been accepted 1) it seemed unlikely that we would get the Adelaide house and 2) if we didn’t we definitely weren’t going to be selling our house.
[Note from Jerusha: It took a couple of weeks for Luke to convince me to even look at the house. I was utterly uninterested in discussing real estate when we had a sick son to take care of. Luke has always liked real estate and has been excited about some places in the past. However when he was still excited after a couple of weeks and said he would be interested in buying it without even looking at it I suddenly knew he was very interested. It wasn’t that I didn’t think it looked like a great place, but at this stage we were gearing up for Ethan’s surgery and recovery and I didn’t see how we could do everything to get a house ready for market at the same time. So I looked more closely at it and Luke promised that if I didn’t like it after seeing it he would drop the matter. So I went down for 24 hours fully expecting to give Luke all the reasons why it wouldn’t work. Instead I could see the potential the place had for our family and things progressed from there. And I loved the quick catch up with my family while I was there.]
One thing that made all this possible was that were were able to negotiate a 4 month settlement with the people we were buying from. It gave us time to get our house ready for sale in December and over Christmas and New Year and in mid January it went on the market. So it meant that much of our spare time over the Christmas and New Year period was spent packing boxes, cleaning up, getting rid of 10 years of accumulated clutter, moving some of our old furniture out and moving far more trendy furniture in. At the same time we had Ethan’s radiation treatments which were often at 7.30am…so we were staying up past midnight working on the house and then up early to get him to the hospital. Somehow we had the energy to do it.
With Jerusha and I spending countless hours on work inside and outside the house, we didn’t spend as much time as we wanted doing fun things with the kids, although we did try and book in at least one fun activity each day. We’re grateful for several friends who had our kids over to play during this time. We’re also grateful for our friend Linda Hart who gave us some great interior decorating tips, helped us rearrange the furniture in each room – and we were exceptionally happy with the results. Plus Jerusha’s parents loaned us some nicer furniture and decorative things to dress our house up.
There were also some professionals who did an outstanding job helping us that we’ll mention in case you need a removalist, storage facility, painter or cleaner. Our friends from school, Phil and Sarah Barnett, own Moveworx – a moving and storage company. Phil and his guys were friendly, efficient and super helpful. Fred the Painter doesn’t have a website, but if you want a great value painter in Sydney get in touch and we’ll give you his number – he and his team got almost the whole house done in less than two days. And our friends from church the Avilas have a commercial cleaning business and came and helped us clean for a couple of hours.
So after open homes on Saturday Jan 18th, 25th and Feb 1st, we had a final open house yesterday on Feb 8th and an auction was held directly after. After some slow moments early on in the auction it moved along towards the end and we sold at a price we were very happy with. The way it all worked out and the price we got confirmed again that this was the right move for our family and that things were falling into place.
It was a strange feeling going to bed last night knowing that we had sold the house. We’ve spent out entire married lives of just under 10 years here, but it feels like the right thing to do and the right time to move on. Over the coming weeks we’ll be looking for a rental property in the Castle Hill area so the kids can keep going to the same school. We’ll be renting our Adelaide house out until we move down there, we expect to be at the start of 2016.
Here are some photos of our current house that we just sold:
Photos of the new house in Teringie, Adelaide:
Thomas An says
That is such a wonderful news !!
Congratulation and wish you all the best!
Our family will always remember and thank for looking after us in Baulkham hills ward.
Thomas
Luke says
Thanks Thomas – all the best for your move soon. Your family is very special to us and we look forward to keeping in touch into the future!
Taylor Johnston says
Don’t leave us!!!!!!!!!!!!
Luke says
You’ll be away somewhere before we leave Taylor! The kids love you so much you’ll have to come visit.