first home buyers

I ring my son before nine. I’m keen to see his new house. He took the keys last Thursday and flew to New Zealand on Friday for his partner’s mother’s fiftieth birthday. He came back Sunday night and continued moving in yesterday.

I’ll be round just after ten, I tell him. He says his partner Katie has just landed, is on her way home. I ask if he’d prefer I didn’t come to visit. He’s not fussed, never is. So I pick up my good woman and we take the freeway to Frankston and on to Somerville.

Just as my good woman and I buy the first place we look at, so too my son and Katie. It’s a brick veneer, forty years old, low ceilings with fans that would take your toupee off. Or leave you needing one. The house sits at an odd angle across the block; a large steel shed does the same, making it hard to figure what shape the block is.

Whatever its shape, it has a backyard big enough to grow plenty. I ask Mo if he’s keen to grow a garden. He says he is, but a big vegie garden is his priority. The yard is grassed to knee height. The previous owner moved out a month ago after a heart attack. He cleaned nothing, mowed nothing.

Turns out the previous owner is something of a dipsomaniac. The real estate photos at the time of sale show a large bar in the lounge room. It’s gone. A large deck under a grubby green sail is lined with railings for beer glasses to alight on. Two cigarette butts encased in spider web sit in a glass ashtray on the rail. On the back fence is a sign: Gentlemen this way. Behind the shed is a urinal tacked onto the fence.

The last room I enter is the bathroom. “Holy fuck, would you look at this,” I enjoin my good woman. It’s a big room for a bathroom, but needs to be to house a dual spa bath with headrests, a dunny, shower recess, vanity, and glassed-in steam room with seating for two and a control panel. It has more tap handles and steam jets that Birkenau.

This is the former home of a sixty-something year-old Lothario, drinking and smoking women into his steam den. The fancy plumbing is to be replaced by a walk-in wardrobe. The current built-in robe in the master bedroom would barely house two fluffy dressing-gowns let alone the clothes of a young woman who manages a clothing shop.

Absolutely none of this matters one jot to Mo and to Katie. They own a house. It’s theirs and they can do what they like with it. My son is hell-bent on paying it off as soon as he can.

Driving away I reflect to my good woman that he finally has a house at age 33. I was 33 when I bought my first house.

Rock on.