Why dream of vineyards?

It looks like my dream house has sold.
I drove past there on the weekend and the “for sale” sign had gone. I hope the purchaser is able to maintain the property and make it productive.
I’d hate to drive by one day and see the vines have been ripped out.

I’m not sure why I find vineyards appealing. I’ve done some vineyard work and some of it was far from pleasant. The very first job I had after my move to the country was netting several blocks of vines. It took four full days and was the most physically demanding work I’ve ever done.

Rolls of bird-netting were attached to the back of a tractor with the netting threaded through a tall T-shaped frame. The tractor was driven between two rows of vines and the net was manually pulled across three rows of vines at a time, one man on either side. The job required the net to be pulled while keeping up with the tractor. The netting was very dusty after being stored away for a year, and along with the dust came a year-old shower of dried leaves and twigs that had been caught up when the nets had last been removed.

Over the years it had been found that gloves were too much of a hindrance, with every known type being tried and found inefficient. Therefore the work was done bare handed, subjecting the fingers to the roughness of nylon netting. It was not surprising that if gloves didn’t last long with this work, the skin on fingers wouldn’t fare any better. It wasn’t long before my hands and fingers were bloody and very sore.

After the first couple of days I was determined not to return, but fortunately the Australia day public holiday came in the middle of the four days and I had time to get over the shock. Surprisingly the last two days seemed much easier. The reason for that later became obvious. Firstly I’d been able to gain a little fitness in the earlier days so found it less difficult to keep up. Secondly, the last two days were on flatter ground. In his wisdom the vineyard manager had started us on the steepest section. Not only did we have to jog along while pulling a heavy bunch of netting, we had to do most of it uphill.

About a month later I was called back to that vineyard to remove the netting. That was far easier. The tractor did most of the work this time, winching the net back into a roll. All I had to do was to keep up with the tractor and anticipate and prevent any snagging of the net on vines and posts. This job took half of the time and the vines were soon ready for the pickers to get started.

My third vineyard job was therefore grape picking and I was paid by the lug (a plastic box with a volume of approx 30-40 litres). I worked continually throughout the day with no breaks. For ten full hours I earned $70. It was a year of drought and the grapes were so tiny that it took many more bunches than usual to fill the lug. Some people picked twice as much as I did, and it wasn’t until the following year that I learned their secret. Where I had been picking everything I came across, some people didn’t bother picking the smaller stuff; they went straight for the biggest grapes and left the rest. Considering it takes the same amount of time to pick a small bunch as it does to pick a large one, it was much more profitable for themselves to get the grapes that filled the lug more quickly and leave everything else unpicked.

While the drought and the resulting small grapes weren’t very profitable for me, it didn’t harm the wine at all. The winery recently won an international award for the Shiraz produced from that crop.

The last work I did in a vineyard was about two and a half years ago. I was hired to thin out the grapes in another local vineyard. That meant removing bunches of late ripening grapes which if left would reduce the sugar content of the crop.
In this job I encountered what is probably a common hazard: large spiders with webs stretching from one row of vines to the next. Most of the webs weren’t noticed until it was too late because we were concentrating on the grapes instead of where we were walking. It was unpleasant enough to walk into a vacant web, but when a spider was still in residence at face height, it was much more than unpleasant.

The Imperfections of a Perfect House

Country Change part 3

After a few weeks and a lot of money spent on legal fees, we backed out of the purchase of the perfect house. Several unrelated concerns all came together to make the process of buying the place too stressful.
I’m not sure where it started, but living so far away without the chance of checking the place again didn’t help. Imagination helped to inflate a few minor concerns into potentially major problems. The legalities were taking longer than expected. Building inspections revealed a few minor problems – which as per above became imagined major problems; and the few cosmetic inadequacies started to be perceived as daunting renovation projects.

We planned to rent the place out for a couple of years until we were ready to move. It already had tenants and their lease still had a few months to run. But we hadn’t done our homework on things like landlord’s insurance and when the real estate agent started sending us brochures and forms, trying to sell us their recommended product, my ignorance of the matter started to scare me. At the same time I had been reading some real estate statistics and found that the median house price in the town was 2/3 of the amount we had agreed to pay – had we agreed to an inflated purchase price?

Then the house’s few deficiencies started to become an issue. It had no garage and the car port roof was bent. The doors on the built in wardrobes and linen cupboards weren’t fitted correctly. There was a water leak in the laundry. The access to the front door from the path didn’t have a proper step. The evaporative air-conditioning unit on the roof seemed to be too close to the chimney of the log fire. All of these were concerns that could have been easily cleared up if we had been able to see the place again.

In the end the worries took over, we dropped our plans to buy and my peace of mind was restored.

Did we do the right thing? It’s hard to say. At times it seems like we made a big mistake. The house itself was exactly what we wanted, but the block of land was probably too small. It also had the wrong aspect, facing to the west with the back garden on the east side of the house. It was a sloping block on the low side of the road, and because of the slope, the back garden would be in the shade of the house for most of the afternoon and would get full sun only in the morning. The backyard was also the smaller part of the garden with the house being built closer to the back of the block than the front. This didn’t really suit the hopes I had for the garden I was planning
We now drive past the house quite frequently and it it is easy to wonder what could have been – but in doing so we are aware that the house is further from the town than the house we eventually bought, and since Gloria doesn’t drive that could have been a problem.

For quite a while I felt a little guilty for letting the vendor down, but several months later I found out that after the failed sale, the price of the house was increased by $30,000 and sold immediately. And that was an indication of the next problem we faced – the start of a booming market.

House Hunting

Country Change part 2

How do you shop for a house in a town 400km from where you live?

At first our attempts were limited to the couple of times per year that we passed through the town on our way to visit Gloria’s family. We would take a break from our journey (which we used to complete in one day) by taking a short detour to our chosen town where we would stay overnight. This gave a few hours to check the real estate situation.
Clearly this wasn’t ideal. It would take a lot of luck to be in town at just the right time when that perfect house came onto the market. It would also give us only one chance to see a house before we had to make a decision on whether it was the right place for us.

To help our search we made a list of the things we wanted in a house. There were the essentials, and there were the desirables. After living in a small two bedroom flat for over ten years we each wanted a little space for ourselves to pursue our different interests. Gloria wanted a room for her crafts, where she could leave things out until her project was finished instead of packing everything away each day. I wanted a study/library where my books could be brought out of storage and where I’d have a suitable environment to write. We also wanted enough land to suit my ambitious gardening plans.
Other requirements were more cosmetic and not considered essential, things that would give the place a bit of character such as polished floorboards.
Overall we had a lengthy list. We were planning a major upheaval and we wanted to do it right and leave no room for regrets.

When we were looking around for a suitable town, one of the key factors was the cost of housing. We spent a lot of time looking in the windows of real estate agents, to see what kinds of properties were available and for what price. The town we eventually chose had several four bedroom houses advertised, on a few acres of land for less than a quarter of the price of a run down house in Ryde where we were then living. Our dream seemed very attainable.

When we moved on from window-shopping to actually inspecting houses, we were given a sudden reality check. Most of the houses didn’t come up to expectations. There may have been four bedrooms mentioned in the advertising, but some were so small I’m not sure how a bed would fit into them, not that we were going to use them as bedrooms, but we still needed them to be a reasonable size.
No matter how many houses we saw, there was always something lacking, nowhere had that feeling of “home” and we were becoming a little discouraged.

Then we were taken to a house that had everything. The floor plan was perfect. The house had more than we had hoped for. Some of the cosmetic requirements were missing but the layout of the house itself was exactly what we wanted. It had four very good sized bedrooms, a workable kitchen and dining room with plenty of storage and workbenches. There was a formal lounge room AND a separate, less formal family room. At the back of the house with access from the family room and the dining room was a covered veranda with views of the countryside. There were also additional rooms under the house providing a potential fifth bedroom or private guest retreat with en-suite.
We made arrangements for another viewing the next day and decided to buy it. The first significant part of our dream was becoming a reality.
Or so it seemed...

"C" - Change

Country change part 1


I can’t remember exactly when we made the decision to move from Sydney to the country, but it took many years for that decision became a reality.

We were living in a small flat and at that time we were surrounded by disruptive neighbours. What a joy it would be to live in a house with a space between us and next door instead of an inadequate common wall separating us from loud music, noisy parties and late night toilet flushing. (Not to mention the amorous nights of the couple upstairs!)

And while our security block of units had some advantages in keeping out most unsolicited visitors (sales reps, JWs etc.), it was not such an advantage when next door’s late night visitors forgot which unit they were visiting and buzzed our intercom instead, long after we had gone to bed.

There would be many advantages to living in a house. Not only would there be more privacy, we could have a garden and grow some of our own food. We could sit outside and not overlook a neighbour’s balcony only metres away. We would have more room inside and my sizable library could be brought out of boxes and put onto book shelves.

Unfortunately the cost of houses in our local area made them ridiculously out of reach. The cheaper places were being snatched up, knocked down and replaced by concrete monstrosities that barely left enough room outside for a clothesline. Even if we could have afforded somewhere, it was not the environment we wanted. The only option was to look away from the city, so we headed out west.
Due to family considerations we restricted our search for a suitable country home to a distance of four hours from the coast and we visited towns from Parkes in the north to Junee in the south. Each town had its unique attractive features but each had some disadvantages, but it didn’t take long to find the place that ticked the most boxes. Fortunately it fell almost exactly halfway between my parents on the coast and Gloria’s parents further west making occasional weekend visits possible.

Finding the right town was the easy part and our choice seemed to be perfect. It had all the necessary services and unlike other country towns, the main street was not lined with deserted shops. So with the location chosen, all we needed to find was the right house.
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Note: While moves to country areas away from the coast are usually referred to as a “Tree Change”, I came across the term “C” Change a while ago, in which the “C” stands for “country” and I decided I prefered it to the more commonly used label.