We were up at the crack of dawn. Louise woke up at 3am, I woke up when she was moving about. Louise managed to go back to sleep within the hour but I couldn’t, so I stayed up doing some Internet stuff and prepping all the paper work for our foray in to NZ to find somewhere to live.
Having looked over the TradeMe website and after grabbing the Dominion Post newspaper to have a look for properties, we decided to head off for Paraparaumu to make the 11am appointment with the BNZ to sort out Louise’s bank account.
We got there a little early and stopped off for a coffee and a quick look at the Professionals Real Estate office – very professional, not! As the woman in charge wasn’t there, not a lot seemed to be forthcoming other than a list of possible properties but with no further info – that carried on with our next visit, so we gave up on them!
We met up with Linda Smith at BNZ Paraparaumu – what a lovely, charming woman (and also a Sunderland lass of some 30 years ago). She was really helpful, set up all the accounts Louise needed and then helped me transfer the management of my account over and set up the other stuff that had become available since I had set mine up. Linda’s hubbie works in Tommy’s Real Estate and gave us a number for Cathy of Harveys Rentals.
Cathy was a star! We went out 30 mins after meeting her to view two properties. First was a small cottage, the second a bit of a shack – although bigger than the cottage. After much chatting between ourselves, we told Cathy we’d be back in touch. We went searching for other properties, although we didn’t find anything better – see bit on the Professionals above, she still wasn’t in and had now gone off up North to see a sick friend but leaving no info about any of her properties!!
Having sussed that the shack was bigger, though smelling a little damp which we couldn’t put down to the newly cleaned carpets alone, we also agreed that the more space we had, the more likely we were to try and fill it and the more costly it would be to heat it!
We came back to Wellington for a relatively early night – considering the early start!