The search begins

Posted on | May 28, 2005 | 1 Comment

Today I went to my first auction. For a house. It was in Paddington, a loverly 3 bedroom place with a big backyard. It even had a water feature. No one wanted to pay the price the owners wanted, at least in public, so it was a bit of a fizzer in the sense that we didn’t get to clap for the lucky buyer. Oh well. It was out of my price range, too close to where I am now, and a bit noicer than the place I expect I’ll end up with. But today I thought I’d start to look and get a sense of what’s around.

I saw another apartment in New Farm:


NewFarmApt#1

Cute but a bit too cosy, and a really bad wanna-be-Ikea-catalogue feel to it. And sooo many wedding photos! Argh. A veritable couple shrine. But v good location. Apparently they were selling because it had become time to breed.

I’m a bit scared about how this whole house buying thing is going to make me feel. I was talking to a friend about it the other day, who’s also looking but in Sydney around the Cross. She was saying it’s really disconcerting and challenging to be a young single woman looking for a house on your own. (We’re both in this position because we have had a parent or parents die young, so we have early inheritance scenarios). We’ve been giving each other pep talks in preparation for the inevitable increase in happy couple exposure over the next few months. I keep telling myself: it can only make me stronger! But at least it should provide some good research exercises in heteronormativity. I’m pretty sure I’m the only laydee on the market for a femme frat house in Vegas.

Over the next few months I’ll be blogging the search for the FFH. Not quite an online art project, as someone once encouraged me to do, but you’ll get the idea. I want to think out loud about what features make a good ‘home’ when you’re not a nuclear family; what features and factors become more and less important because of that. I think this could be a potentially very interesting way to go about the whole thing, and a way to make it feel less lonely and big. So for those of you already thinking, ‘What?! mc gregg has joined the evil mortgage belt aspirational class!’, I hope you might instead see this as a tiny theoretical and political adventure.

Category: Out in Vegas

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One Response to “The search begins”

  1. home cooked theory » Blog Archive » Self-branding
    October 11th, 2007 @ 7:36 pm

    [...] A key aspect of my online identity that I’ve been made aware of this week is the way that I have used my blog to express feelings of loneliness, isolation and disaffection with Brisbane since moving here. While those feelings have certainly had a real basis at times, particularly early on, it’s increasingly apparent that reading about those feelings on my blog has led people to make gestures and suggestions about my life (from coffee dates to flatmates) based on that knowledge. It seems that sometimes they have been offended when I haven’t recognised these offers as indications of potential friendship. [...]

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