Coping With It All

House Hunting
They have a great way of selling houses here, on Saturday and Sundays they have open days. You just look in the local property guide to find which ones are open, better still, just drive around....the signs are everywhere. The only snag with this is that most of them are between 12 & 2pm, so you can only get around a few especially when they are far apart from each other, however, this is a great way to just pop in without appointments and even better to see the really expensive houses just for decor idea's!
Contracts
Mmm....good and bad things here, once you see a house you like you put a offer in by way of a contract along with a deposit, this means once the offer is accepted, you have to get your checks sorted from the date of the contract (we were pushed into 7 days). The checks include a buildings and pest inspection, sorting out a mortgage if applicable, and the mortgage valuation. The good thing about the contract is once the vendor has signed then they are bound by it, on our part, if we pull out then we loose the deposit as well as paying 0.25% of the purchase price. No problems until you try to get all your checks done within a week! we were late with the mortgage offer and certainly was not going to let the contract run on chance, so we asked for a extension and reluctantly got it from the vendors.
Pavements
You will rarely see any pavements in the suburbs and housing estates, you either walk on the road or along peoples front lawn, however, there are a lot of wide roads so not much chance of getting run over. Street lamps are also scarce, it can be pitch black in certain places, but nothing to worry about, just start eating plenty of carrots.....
School Uniform
Some uniforms are pretty cool with plenty of street cred, at one School we went by all the rules and kited our son out with the official stuff, of course, after his first day we discover everyone wears Bilabong shorts ! When we enrolled him in his first School after arriving here, it was decided he was better to start the beginning of a new term, between this time we kited him out with suggested uniform from there own shop. A few days before he was due to start we received a call from the School saying the uniform had change colors and he would need to change it before he even started!!!!! No explanation why, no refund and no compensation.
Spiders and Crawleys
I hated spiders in the UK and knew this might be a problem for me (Jerry), I know this subject gets a good discussion going on the Forum and am aware there are many people out there who have the same fears. Yes, you are going to see them, not just spiders, all sorts of crawleys as well as well as weird flying things (the moth the size of a sparrow comes to mind) I am not going to go into much depth here as I am sure it puts many people off from even coming here, YUK
Motor Bike Test
I always wanted to take my test back in the UK but could not get around going through the whole system and continued riding my wee 125cc for years. I decided to take the plunge here and boy, am I glad I did. You take what they call a Q-ride test, this is a one day event where you have to have a normal car licence and a learner bike permit, the later is obtained by just answering 5 questions! On the day it is a matter of riding around a few cones, discussions, practice braking and indicating and a few other things. At the end of the day you are given a license to ride any size bike. too easy as they say......
Dark Nights
For us, this is a draw back, we loved the long light nights in the summer back in the UK (weather permitting) by 6.00pm it is dark here in Queensland, by 8.00pm it seems very late, however one does get used to it, when we were in NSW we had a extra hour of light due to the clocks, this in fact was one of the reasons why we stayed there for so long before coming to the Sunshine coast.
Food Stores
Getting used to the food shops, we did miss Sainsburys first of all, choosing which brand to buy when they are all new to you is a decision! The chocolate taste different here, I was a chocoholic back in England, not any more, I am told they put something in it to help stop it from melting! whatever it is it taste horrible. You a great range of Asian products if thats what your into.
Insurance
Seems a bit crazy this one, when we signed the contract on our new house we had one month till the date to exchange contracts, during this time you have to insure the property even though the vender still has to insure it as well?????
Spiders again?
Did I mention spiders here somewhere? Mmmmmm, perhaps I wont mention the one we saw the other night, and I wont say anything about its size even though I have never seen anything as big as this one!
Home contracts again
We have just received all the charges involved in buying our new home, there are at least 15 different charges, one of them being having to pay for the Vendors solicitor! I am not sure if all banks charge this, but the one we choose did!!!!