Yo I'm back! So. Let's talk about the some of the crappy stuff that happened in the process of moving House. The main issue, I suppose, was the new housemate we had, the Law Enforcer guy, who as I'd discovered was pretty unreliable when it came to money: late bill payments, non-payment of debts, etc. He went away on a holiday for about 20 days and only got back 3 days before we were due to move out. Subsequently when the cleaners came to do the final "vacate cleaning" in the house, his stuff was still all over the place, which, of course, made it kinda stressful for yours truly, who had been tasked with letting the cleaners in.
Then there was the issue of cleaners' payment: I'd asked the dude to leave $100 as part of his share of the cleaning on the kitchen bench. That evening, the money wasn't there. The dude claimed he'd left it. But, unless we were blind, there was no money to be found, and unless the cleaners themselves had pocketed it and denied it, he'd not left the money. Subsequently, Social Housemate had to leave $100 of his own money to make up for the shortfall, which, again, was one of those infuriating things that really didn't need to happen, grr argh!!! Let's just say I'm glad to be out of that house and away from the idiocy of certain people who, in all honesty, make terrible housemates!!
But the household woes weren't over yet! You see, part of the agreement upon moving out was that we'd leave the house "in the same condition as when it was first leased", i.e. about four years ago, before I'd come along (no matter how ludicrous or improbable that sounds). Subsequently I'd arranged with my mate Jay, who's a professional painter and construction guy, to come over and help work on bits and bobs around the house that needed a touch-up. Jay, who lives over 60km away, was more than happy to come over and do the job for free. So he'd gone about the house touching up areas that needed to be touched up, using paint that had been prescribed by the landlady.
HOWEVER: when he got to my room, the paint didn't match the walls! So that was odd!! The paint we used matched the rest of the house perfectly, and yet the areas that Jay touched up were obviously not matching, which Jay surmised to possibly have been because the walls had been painted over before (including right before I'd moved in, by the previous tenant)... or possibly because the previous tenant had not used the precise, correct shade of paint when he'd done the repaint job!!! So the landlady then said it was up to me to get the entire room repainted, which I thought was a bit of an overreaching request. This ended up being a bone of contention among me, the housemates, the landlady, and some of my friends on Facebook who gave their opinions as to whether this constituted a case that required a complete repaint. What do you think?
| See those patches?? |
Last Saturday (not yesterday, but a week ago, the 14th), my mate Jay, Plant Lover and I had gone to the house to do the almost-final inspection painting, and the landlady had asked that some of the busted light bulbs be replaced. So after driving back to my new place, I decided to pick up some light bulbs and head to the house and get it sorted. I did that, drove over, and saw a man in the driveway: turns out he was the landlord, who I'd never met, so I left the car and greeted him and got distracted, and we went into the house to talk about things and look at problem areas, blah blah blah. Later on, halfway through discovering that my lightbulbs weren't the right kind and needed to be exchanged in the store, I realised: I didn't have my wallet.
I didn't have my wallet. And yet I must've had it, since I'd bought the bulbs to begin with. Thus began the whole panicked wild goose chase of retracing footsteps; scouring the car for it; checking at the shops and leaving messages with the manager for it to be returned to me if someone found it; looking through the entire house (which wasn't hard since the place was empty), and and and and and... not finding it. Jeezus. What a way for the whole frustrating North Lake Road House move-out to culminate!!! So I had to cancel bank cards, make a police report (fun fact: not all WA police stations operate 24/7; I had to wait until Monday before I could make a report); and mourn the fact that I'd lost my Malaysian ID card and Malaysian driver's licence, the latter of which I'd been using to drive around in Perth, grrr arrgh!!
On the Monday after I'd lodged the report, while buying some fragrance diffusers and candles at Dusk in Garden City (yup), I'd received a phone call from a sergeant in Rockingham, about 40km away from Myaree where the wallet had gone missing, to be told that they'd found a couple of my bank cards. In Rockingham. The policeman said he'd dispose of the cards for me since they'd been cancelled anyway. "Also, I can't return the Maybank card to Malaysia, unless you want to pay for me to go on a holiday!" he joked, to which I guffawed obligingly, sigh.
In a way, his phone call provided some closure as it meant I wasn't imagining things and the wallet hadn't disappeared into some mystery hole in my car that I just wasn't seeing; it had well and truly been misplaced... stolen. From my car, I suspect, as I tended to chuck the wallet into the passenger seat after getting in. And since I'd been distracted by the landlord at the house and had walked away from the car unlocked, someone must've taken it from the car despite it being parked in the driveway. Which was the cherry on top of the icing where it came to the whole housing situation.... and this was before the landlady demanded a room repaint! GRRR!! ARRRGGGGH!!!
Anyway, it's all over now. I never found the wallet or my ID. The room has been repainted thanks to the Airtasker dude, Remi, a lovely young French man with beautiful soft brown eyes and a delightfully lilting French accent. He did a wonderful job, too. See? It almost made me want to make mismatched patches on some of the other walls, arf arf arf.
So that's hopefully the end of the North Lake Road house drama (apart from what I foresee to be the stress of chasing the former housemates for money to settle the final bills). The good news is that the landlady was pleased with the painting job by Remi and Jay (and some of it was my own work as I, too, went about painting over some of the smaller flaws around the house) and she said we'd be getting our bonds back in full, which, according to Plant Lover Bren, is quite a rare occurrence. So... yay for the win, I guess!! Now to settle in and make this new house on Cottrill Street a home.
| As part of the ongoing beautification of our new home, Plant Lover and I bought a moon wall clock. After hanging it up, we both stood in the middle of the floor for several moments, looking up in beatific silence at the moon. |
This post first appeared on Memoirs Of A Madcap Malaysian Musicmaker Madly Musicmaking And Making Mad Music (Est. 2004), please read the originial post: here
