In the begining - purchase

Back on 1999, Melinda and I were engaged and wanted to purchase a house to move into straight after our honeymoon. We were both still living at our respective parents' houses, and I was renting an industrial unit to run my business from. The reality was that I didn't need the space of the industrial unit, and was paying a lot of rent for space I wasn't using.

With that in mind, I wanted to make sure that I could run my business from home before we bought it. In fact, we hadn't even found a house to buy when, in May 1999, I contacted Lake Macquarie City Council's planning department and explained that my business was only me, inspecting but not working on vehicles, and that the maximum number of vehicle movements would be one vehicle coming and going per hour, since that was the shortest time that I booked appointments for.

The planner who I spoke to discussed it in a departmental meeting, and came back to me on 1st June with the answer that, even though I was inspecting vehicles, it would be deemed to be a "home office" and that it did not require council approval to operate from home.

Because I'd obtained the phone number that my previous employer had abandoned when he moved his business while I was working for him, I had rented a shed in the telephone exchange area for that phone number to avoid paying redirection on every call. Obviously, I also wanted to buy a house in the same area for the same reason.
 
We had looked at several places, and all of them were unsuitable for my purposes, as the yards were consistently unable to be used to park vehicles off the road to inspect them. One weekend, we had driven around looking at the places that were in our price range, and, just after dark while on the way back to my industrial unit to pick up my ute, we saw the place that we ended up buying. It was a gently sloping double block with a house on one side and a garage set well back on the other. It needed work but would be a viable starting point, so we contacted the agent.

We paid a deposit on 15th September 1999, having agreed to purchase the property for $100,000. We married on Saturday 23rd October 1999, and the house settled on Friday 29th. From memory, I think that we had less than $100 total between us on the day of settlement.

We moved in over the weekend, starting running the business from there on Monday, 1st November. Within the first few days, I pruned all the shrubs on the footpath so that we could see over them to drive out the driveway, and within the first few weeks I demolished most of the front brick fence that was broken and just sitting there.

In December 1999, we paid a concreter to concrete across the footpath, widening the driveway to about 10 metres wide in the process. The improvement in access literally transformed the property.

We concentrated on paying off the mortgage and did very little else for about 6 years. Over that time, we spent quite a bit of time thinking about various options for extending the existing house or demolishing it and starting again.