Neutral Bay

My current bedroom in the Neutral Bay sharehouse. I like this house a lot, it has space in. The only downside is obviously that it is on the wrong (north) side of the bridge. It is SO straight here. So vanilla. And there are like, 5 supermarkets all within a few blocks of each other. At least we are not far from the beach. I am now one of those terrible people for whom there is no life outside the inner west.

In one week I will no longer live in Sydney. No longer live in Australia.

Flat photos!

Here's some (bad) photos of the new(ish) flat in Erskineville.





The living room, and doors out to the balcony.



Kitchen.... small but a lot of cupboards so not too bad.



To give a better idea of the layout. View from dining area towards living area and kitchen.



Dining area/books/piano.



Dining area back towards kitchen.



Mark's office, featuring the new Norman Foster desk!

There's no bedroom photo as yet because it seems to be in permanent state of disarray. It looks like the office but bigger and with a bed in. There's also a bathroom and utility room, but boorrrriiing.

The balcony you can see in another post below...

New house !!!

Here is our new building in Erskineville. It is great!!!



It's a converted factory, and they left the chimney on top. I think it's quite a new conversion, only done a few years ago. It's a small block, only I think 40 apartments in the building, and only 12 apartments per each staircase so each communal area is only shared by a small number of people.

Our unit is off the main road, which is nice.



Our balcony is the middle floor, which is good because it means it's covered over by the one above, thus less exposed to rain and hot hot sun.

Furniture

Having grown tired of endless pootling around furniture stores, antique stores, junk stores looking for furniture we actually liked, we resorted to eBay last week. Which turned out surprisingly successful!



Mark got this chair. It was half way through a restoration but the guy gave up. We're gonna get the cushion covered soon. It's very comfy.



Drawers! Having gone from two huge fitted wardrobes in our Nottingham flat to...well...nothing over here, there was a clothes storage crisis. This has solved the problem AND looks amazing. I like how both things have the little tapered legs. Like elegant little gazelles. Gazelles? I clearly know nothing about furniture....

It was interesting to hear the stories of the guys who were selling the furniture when they brought it round. The guy with the chair had been planning to start up a furniture business, restoring this kind of style of stuff, but he said it just never got off the ground so he was now selling on a lot of the stock he had collected. The other guy simply collected furniture of this type, and said that obviously every now and again he ended up with way too much, and had to sell some on.


Mark is in Canberra. He left at some ungodly hour this morning (5.45am I think) and will be back on Thursday. It is odd to be all alone in the house for the first time. I'm going to make a thai yellow curry with the rest of my prawns and get early to bed I think. I was going to make macaroni cheese (Mark doesn't like it, I have to wait til he's away) but I forgot to buy Worcestershire Sauce on the way home and to have macaroni cheese without Worcester Sauce is having a car without an engine. It just won't go.

Shuffling around

This evening Mark and I are getting packed up as we leave the Glebe house tomorrow for another temporary home. At least we will soon have a more permanent home! As I mentioned a couple of posts back, we had our application accepted on the house in Meadowbank and put down a deposit on it last Saturday! Until we can move in on September 3rd, we will be in the Medina Executive Apartments. It looks pretty nice and is being paid for by Macquarie University out of Mark's relocation allowance. The downside is that it's in North Ryde (near Macquarie University), a dull suburban sprawl connected to the city only via a 40 minute bus ride. But, there are gym, sauna and swimming pool facilities, so hopefully I will be too busy getting wet to notice the surroundings too much.

Today Mark took the morning off work and we strolled around Glebe and Newtown, until it was time for a seminar he wanted to attend at the University of Sydney. We also had another poke around in Gould's Book Arcade on King Street, the most brilliant warehouse piled full of second hand books, where I acquired Nylon magazine and Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. That makes the second Nabokov novel I have bought in a week (the first being The Defence, found for $3 on a stall at Glebe Market) - the lesser known ones that I found hard to get hold of in the UK just keep appearing!

Here's a few pictures from around Glebe/Newtown:


View of the Central Business District.




On King Street, Newtown.


Mark in a cafe reading Nylon.

Rain booo.

Feeling a bit ill today, got a cold coming I think. The weather is awful at the moment which doesn't help; it has poured with rain pretty much solidly since yesterday evening. This means I am stuck inside the house, as neither of the three pairs of shoes (well...two pairs of actual shoes and one pair of flip flops) I brought with me in my suitcase are very rain-appropriate. I wore my canvas shoes to just walk a hundred meters down to the Fair Trade Café on Glebe Point Road last night and they almost died, so I am having to give them a day off today.

I also need more clothes! I am so fed up of the same hoodie-jeans-jacket everyday. I think American Apparel is due to open their Sydney store soon though, possibly even today, so I need to get down there and pick up a new hoodie, especially since the $$$ price works out slightly cheaper than the £££ price.



I may end up with this one in brown. I kind of favour the hoodie dress that they do (they same thing just longer like a dress), but it doesn't come in brown and I am kind of attracted to this brown. Ho hum we'll see.



I like this cardigan as well, it's a unisex one but looks a good fit, and I'm always borrowing Mark's cardigans because I like how they fit so it would be good to get my own and I'm sure he would appreciate it!

Mark just skyped me with some good news!!! We got our application accepted on the house in Meadowbank!!! I'm so excited! It is still a month until we can move in, but it's so good to know there is some stability coming. We move out of this house in Glebe next Thursday, and Macquarie University (Mark's work) are hopefully sorting us out something for the intervening weeks.

In other news, I forgot to write that I passed my Graduate Diploma in Law, and not only passed but got a Commendation, hurrah! So there are two things to celebrate right now. Although they will possibly be celebrated by hiding in bed from the weather...

Possible home

On Sunday we caught the ferry out to Meadowbank to look at Mianna's (Mark's colleague) house. She is moving out and we have the possibility of taking over the lease. It was a grey, overcast, chilly day but you still got a great view of the harbour. It would be an amazing trip to take in the summer.

The house is really nice! It's a bungalow (as are most suburban houses) built in 1914 with a good amount of space and really lovely period features.



That's the living room, it's so cosy and I love the fireplace and windows. Mianna and her partner have a 6 year old daughter and that's her little dinner table in the middle! (The wine glasses are obviously ours!)

Meadowbank is a very quiet suburban area with a couple of local shops and a park, and a supermarket in the next suburb. The house is 3 minutes walk from the station to get into the city in 25 minutes. We are having a big think but we are very keen on it!