Of Adolescence & Adulthood June 2004 Click to view Table of Contents Click to view photo gallery Click to view cover story

Non-fiction

The Lamentations Of A Teenage Homeowner  By melissa yow

How many first-time homeowners can boast that they are only seventeen? First-year undergraduate Melissa Yow takes you on a harrowing encounter house-shopping in metropolitan Melbourne.

It has been the most harrowing two weeks of my entire life.

My first-time readers might cringe in disgust at my nonsensical rave about how I have, in the space of two weeks, done more menial labour than I have ever dreamt of doing, and I concede that when it comes to moving my ass, the amount I deem back-breakingly excessive is perhaps equivalent to the energy expended by the average person between each nail-crunching minute of the Superbowl commercials. However, people who know me will (hopefully) clap me on the back, or better still, send me congratulatory gifts for furnishing and cleaning my very first apartment in Melbourne.

Yes, that’s right. I officially have my own home. If any of you have ever heard your parents complaining about how hard it is picking out a home… for once, they were right. It is even more annoying than those tiny shoes that squeak with every step, despite the deceptively angelic face of the baby whose feet they are strapped on. What are mothers thinking anyway? Don’t they want their babies to be cooed over by strangers in public? Those things are social suicide, and I bet it annoys the hell out of their kid too. But enough of that. Let' s move on to my apartment searching escapades in the inner city of Melbourne.

The first day of my arrival was met with that heavy sense of “Oh no, here I am again.” You know the feeling. Leaving home always does that to you, no matter where in the world you go, unless of course it is a vacation to Hawaii. However, that sentiment was offset by what I now know to be an overly-optimistic perception of home-shopping, that of it being a short, less-than-a-week thing. On the outset, I thought, what could be so hard about it? Choosing a location, viewing the apartment, buying some furniture... doesn’t sound too hard, does it? Well, my blisters can attest to the fact that it is.

Total amount of time spent searching for apartment: ONE WEEK. Yes, there went my timeline. I still cannot believe we spent that much time just choosing an apartment. And the parking spaces, or more specifically, lack thereof, in the city was not a helpful factor either. Considering the number of miles I walked, I could be in Zimbabwe by now. There were heated debates over location, crime rates, transport, and accessibility ­ my arguments, of course, fuelled by some fine research on every topic due to daily viewings of the local news and current affairs talk shows. I have also discovered something truly amazing: Australian real estate agents don’t help at all. You would think that with the level of service they provide Down Under that they’d really roll out the red carpet for people who even have a passing thought of blowing big bucks on a piece of property, right? At least, that was what I thought. Walking into a certain well-established agent’s office (which I shall not name here), I expected at least a “Good day!” Did I get one? Obviously not. Come on, even the people working at McDonald’s for much less say that, regardless of whether they actually mean it.

So, there they all were, sitting at their fancy table in their matching black-and-whites, pretending to be busy doing work. After swallowing the indignity of being ignored, we ask them for help in getting an apartment, in case they don’t realize that we are not in their office by mistake. After a few seconds, one of the women glanced up at us, looked around and realized that none of her colleagues were going to reply, and told us we can have a look at the printed sheets of apartment listings lying on a little stand near the door. Now tell me: did we come here to look at more apartment listings? Of course not! Why would you go into an office full of estate agents to look at more apartment listings? So, I have come to the conclusion that real estate agents are being paid to do absolutely nothing. Shocking, just shocking. I suppose I won’t even have to tell you that we left immediately (but not before grabbing some of those listings anyway).

After all that, the early wake-up-calls at ungodly hours, the forced squinting at the tiny newspaper print, the mind-boggling map-deciphering and the endless walking in the bitter cold summer… guess what happened? We did not end up with a single one of those apartments, the ads of which we had so painstakingly circled in the newspapers, or wrangled from the estate agent, or journeyed ­ lost and desperate ­ to view for ourselves. No, what I ended up with was an apartment we chanced upon, just further down across the road from the University of Melbourne, whose giant “For Rent or Sale” sign was plastered so obviously against its wall that I could almost kill myself for never noticing it despite having taken multiple tram rides to the university before.

So, we knew what we wanted and we finally found one we liked. We went in to take a look. We chose a unit. Everything was done in a rush because we had already wasted too much time, and the call of the workplace was beckoning to my increasingly guilt-ridden, employee-deserting parents. Incredibly (and I thought this could only happen in the movies), we ended up with an absent-minded salesman, who forgot to call us to tell us which unit we finally got, who forgot to tell us when we could move in, and who forgot to inform the owner of the apartment of our decision so that we could actually rent the place. Total number of days wasted: TWO ­ and this may not sound like a big deal, but when you are an uptight teenager with a perpetually high-strung mom and a sighing, this-is-all-a-waste-of-my-precious-time dad, it is plenty. And I haven’t even got to the part about buying the furniture.