First of all, we love the street, which still boasts old-time Collingwood residents who help each other out. There are two beautiful bluestone houses in the street: no. 17, and no. 35, some of Melbourne’s oldest houses.
There’s a psychiatrist, a weather man, a fashion pattern maker, a scientist, a potter, an earth moving contractor, a kindergarten teacher, a plumber. One neighbour had a 90th birthday party for his favourite neighbours not so long ago and takes ‘the bushwalk’ as a constitutional most days. There are young kids too. There are Vietnamese people and old Italian people. It’s a real mix that you won’t find in more suburban areas.
We love having dinner parties in the living room using the huge French doors to move furniture around. The afternoon sun comes in through the rear set of doors. It seats 10 people elegantly, as does the courtyard. We had so many summer dinner parties in the courtyard (though the pergola needs a covering of wisteria at the moment). Sometimes we had adults in the courtyard and kids at a table in the living room, connected by the open French doors until the kids got raucous. For many years, we had a dining table in the living room as well as a living space with a couch and t.v.: you can fit both comfortably.
The trains do not affect us at all. We never notice them and they have never interfered with going to sleep or sleeping, even the little children. That’s what everyone told us would happen when we bought the place 15 years ago. No doubt you will be sceptical about that, as we were, but you’ll just have to trust me. No one is ever going to build out that boundary and we always knew that we could go up a storey and have second storey sunset views to the west and a rooftop deck without anyone complaining. The embankment blocks out the noise of the world beyond including Hoddle Street (though you can still hear the occasional roar from the MCG).
We love the front garden with its tall grasses, red flowering gum, hibiscus, and magnolia. It also sports beautifully scented daphne, lemon verbena for making fresh tea, cone flowers, oak leaf hydrangea, red camellia, topiaried English box, vegetable garden (tomatoes at the moment) and Bishop of Clontarf dahlias. So much so that we often drink our morning coffee out on the porch in the morning sun. It has a rainwater tank and an automatic watering system under the soil. The crazy paving is beautifully done in hardy Castlemaine sandstone that cost a bomb, and the whole thing was designed and laid out by Sandra McMahon of Gardenscape Design. The front gates of the beautiful emu wire fence by Old Worlde Fences open very wide to allow ease of access for large items into the property. It’s low maintenance if kept mulched. In winter and spring, bulbs emerge: bluebells, daffodils, freesias, jonquils, irises.
In the back garden there is a cumquat tree which is erupting in the sweetest scented blossoms right now and buzzing with bumble bees taking their nectar away to make honey. Standing next to it in the evening, it smells like someone has spilt a bottle of orange blossom water. In the evening breeze it mixes with the scent of the other major shrub, the gardenia. Masses of jasmine erupt along the side fence in spring, and on the embankment providing shade are wattle trees which provide lovely winter cheer. The back brick wall is covered in creeping fig.
The garden is enhanced by the nearby trees. Standing at the front gate, you can see 8 young street trees: crepe myrtles like the one flowering in the photo of the front of our house on the web, as well as two young eucalypts at the end of the street. When they grow big enough, the Council plans to take out some of the native trees which are getting a bit big.
From the meals area and the living room and courtyard, we get the view of the beautiful stand of elms along the railway embankment and an absolutely splendid gum tree the trunk of which takes up almost the whole of the tiny back yard of one of the neighbours, its devoted owners, a few doors down. It’s not going anywhere; it’s on a register of notable trees, and it makes the property feel a lot less ‘inner city’ than it is. You can sit on a deckchair on the back lawn and look into it and its abundant native birds who go crazy when it flowers.
We love the storage: it’s a luxury in Abbotsford to have a separate laundry, toilet, and bathroom, all with cupboards, a linen cupboard, a pantry with pull out drawers, kitchen cupboards — there are a lot of them — and two built in robes which we retrofitted with the help of Creative by Design, the best in the market. We kept the deco mirrored doors rather than move to something more modern because they give a bit of character to the bedrooms.
We can’t work out now why we didn’t build a roof for the bike racks down the side earlier, and the attic store is a godsend for storing spare mattresses for visitors, camping gear, hand-me down clothes kids are yet to grow into, and travel stuff. It’s accessed by a pull-down ladder, like this one. The attic is wood panel-lined to keep pests out, but also affords access to the roof cavity where you can check out the house’s excellent insulation. Taking a guess, I would say it’s about as big as a king size bed, and you can stand up in it.
There’s also a Kennards self-storage with 24 hour access where you can rent extra cupboard space just 240 m away and many people in the street keep their place decluttered with their help.
We love that it’s weatherboard, and has so many doors and windows, so that when a cool change comes, you can open them all up and get a very quickly cooled down house.
Finally, we love the heating. Hydronic heating is by the far the best form of heating and cost us a lot to install. It’s a gentle and energy efficient heat which doesn’t blow dust all over the house. You can dry things on the heaters safely and there is no problem putting furniture up against it. The gas hot water system is reasonably new and is huge: it never runs out.