I’ve never seen my best friend Fiona so stressed. She is a senior speech pathologist, type A personality, runs marathons to alleviate stress. It’s actually quite rare to see her in any other frame of mind that isn’t her regular, sustained and organised self. But buying a house clearly tipped her over the edge.
Friday night a couple of weeks ago, she called me late asking if I had used a buyers advocate to purchase my first home. I wished I did. You see, I don’t often tell people because it’s embarrassing to admit we paid more than we wanted for a home that should never have cost so much…there was so much wrong with and about the place when we settled that it set us back a couple of years from where we intended to be.
To get some perspective on Fee, she’s nothing if not super organized. Within a day of moving into our last rental (we are old housemates) she’d already made multiple copies of public transport timetables for us, marked out shopping routes, clocked the local wine bar and taken stock of store closure times. So, it kind of goes without saying that organisation may as well be Fee’s middle name.The day she found a buyers agent, Melbourne’s property market seemed to simply bend in her favour.
To have her call close to tears made me realise something was wrong. But another of her attributes is the fact that if she’s suffering she doesn’t sit in it- rather, she finds a solution straight away.The next day, she called again and told me about the buyers advocate she’d spoken to, a woman who managed the purchasing of homes. She was extremely excited that they’d be meeting to talk about what Fiona really wanted from a home.
Hearing this made me wish I’d never rushed the purchase of our home. If I’d had a little of Fee’s pursuit for help, I wouldn’t have been replacing floorboards and adding skylights when i was supposed to be luxuriating in the comfort of my hard earned home.