After Our Return
That night we had tomato sandwiches for dinner (fortunately we had purchased these on the way home), washed down with a couple of glasses of wine. There was almost nothing left in the house to eat. The 615 litre deep freezer was virtually empty, as were the two fridges and the pantry. There were a couple of opened packets of smoked salmon, some gourmet fetta cheese, a packet of faloumi and a cask of chardonnay in the main fridge. None of these had been purchased by us.
Because the two roads from our property into town can be cut by flood waters, and it's a 70 km round trip into town to the supermarket, we always keep our fridges and pantry well stocked. We told the sitter she could take any of this she wanted to eat, as long as she replaced it.
The next day was a series of unpleasant shocks, one after the other. A burned saucepan was in the dish washer, an expensive oven dish purchased with the ovens (custom) was encrusted with burned remains and covered in deceased maggots in the lower oven, and cooking utensils covered with oil and food waste were in the utensils drawer in the kitchen. The inside of the microwave was like a Jackson Pollock painting. The floors were filthy and the kitchen and breakfast room floors had to be washed five times before the water was no longer black in colour. The kitchen benchtops were filthy with encrusted food scraps and spilt coffee and sugar. When we took the towels the housesitter had draped over the lounges off the leather lounge, we discovered numerous stains including what was obviously dog urine. Normally these lounges are covered by heavy velour type throws that completely cover the lounge. But only one was in place, and it formed part of the nest set up for her dog.
Whilst my wife started cleaning up the kitchen, I started to clean up outside. The pool was first. It was covered in rubbish, deep green in colour from algae, and looking like it was fermenting. I cleaned off the surface with a scoop net, turned on the filter pump, and added about 2 kilos of granular chlorine.
I took all the linen to the laundry to wash, but when I emptied the laundry basket there were only two soiled nappies there. This was what the house sitter had been anxious to wash?
I showed this to my wife who said it looked like brasso or silvo and that she had wondered why the tin of brasso was out in the kitchen. Whilst in the laundry looking at the old nappies, she noticed the tin of silvo on the laundry bench. Now it made sense. We went to the TV room in the cabin where all our good crockery, cutlery, glassware and wine was kept and started looking for anything that was missing.
It wasn't long before we realized that a set of 6 solid silver fish knifes and fork was missing. It had been a wedding present from my family for my first marriage and was always kept in the same drawer. We also discovered that a case of wine was missing from behind the lounge.
This prompted us to stop cleaning and do a quick search for missing items. This produced the list of missing items which I took to B*nd*b*rg Police Station on Thursday afternoon, after R*ch*nb*rg Security had changed all the locks on the house. The house sitter had not returned one set of keys so we had no option but to change the locks.
The next day we continued cleaning and tidying up, all the time being conscious of the need to look for things that were missing. I thought I would be adding my wife's nurse's fob watch to the list as well as it was missing from its case in the drawer in her office. However it turned up in the waste paper bin in her office.
So I looked in the waste paper bin in my office and found:
- One of my wife's uni study guides and some of her lecture notes;
- The empty box for a gift presented to my wife for her student mentoring last year (no great value);
- A fact sheet for the drug Seroquel, used for the treatment of schizophrenia.
This prompted me to go through all the bags of rubbish that the housesitter had left lying around the place in case the missing items were in there. Not a pleasant task and my nostrils are still recovering.
I didn’t find any of the missing items but did find:
- One red vinyl ladies handbag (giselle branded on the outside) cut up and the pieces spread across two garbage bags. This did not belong to my wife.
- The charred remains of a dark blue vinyl bag. Unable to identify this further, but not ours.
- Two new pairs of my leather work gloves, cut up and spread across two bags.
- Three pairs of my wife's shoes and a pair of my thongs.
- One oven tray, two pairs of kitchen tongs & six oven mitts.
- Five pairs of our garden gloves.
- One pair of ladies (?) jeans with the legs cut off to be used as shorts. All the labels had been removed but my wife confirms that they weren’t hers. I discovered a week later, when I went to wear them, that a pair of my long denim shorts was missing so I assume now that it was them.
- Part of an Alvey 650 C5 fishing reel (no great value, except sentimental as it was the first reel I ever bought as a preteen).
- A large number of empty beer (mainly Heineken, XXXX Gold & James Boag - nice) and wine bottles and several empty wine casks.
I photographed all these items (except the bottles as they were in each of the twenty nine bags of rubbish). 29 large black bags of rubbish for 9 weeks for one person!!? Extraordinary! Several of these bags were stacked on our large sqaure outdoor dining table, dripping and rotting because many weren't sealed up. No wonder we had an infestation of flies and mice on our return. Fancy wanting to live like that!
It took two days, 6 kilos of chlorine and half a packet of flocculating agent before I could see the bottom of the pool. It took another two days to finally get it completely clean.
Meanwhile we continued cleaning up the place and getting rid of vermin. I loaded nearly a dozen fly traps with the rotting prawns that the house sitter had planted in a small lunch esky (used by my wife for work, no longer possible) in the corner of the TV room and within a week the flies were nearly all gone. It has taken two weeks, and about twenty baits, but the mice are now almost all gone too from the house, the cabin and the sheds. The weeding of the gardens & paths is going to take much longer, and because a lot of the weed had gone to seed, we will have to repeat this every few months for a least a year.
The thing that was really starting to depress us was the amount of damage that had been done to our property. It seemed that every time we would start in an area we would find something else that had been damaged. Some of it was possibly accidental damage, but the majority seemed fairly obviously to be from a deliberate act. Only yesterday I discovered a missing metal oven dish when I cleaned the covered BBQ. It was lying on top of the gas burners and had obviously been burned whilst cooking. The house sitter had attempted to clean it, and in doing so, had worn off sections of the teflon coating and made it unusable. It had been bought not long before we left to go on holiday.
Another thing that is disturbing us is the number of objects that have been moved to places where they obviously don't belong. Only this evening I was checking the top shelf in my son's wardrobe (where the missing sleeping bag was stored) and found a set of metal shears that belonged in the shed. Yesterday I found my BBQ scraper under the pergola.
We wondered whether the house sitter had deliberately done this to hide her tracks.
A week after she left, and in accordance with the Letter of Termination, the house sitter sent a number of "receipts" for reimbursement.
Three of these purported to be for the purchase of sweet potatoes from A**** Family Farms of All****. We spoke to the owner, and showed her the "receipts". She flatly denied that that had supplied any sweet potatoes to the house sitter during the period she was house sitting (they are very particular who they supply to in case it ends up in the markets). Our farm ute is very distinctive because of a canopy system that rolls back towards the cab to give access to all the ute tray. She showed us the sale docket book they use for sale of second-grade produce. This was standard invoice book, and is stamped cash paid to indicated a cash payment. She stated that the scraps of paper that were presented as receipts could have come from a box of produce sold through a local green grocers, or have been taken off a desk in the packing shed. They are extremely concerned someone may have been in their work or packing sheds unescorted and without authority and then presented bogus receipts supposedly issued from their business premises and intend to pursue this matter with QLD Police.
The return address for the house sitter was given as M*ryb*r*ugh Post Office but I have no doubt that she will change that regularly. She used Ch*ld***s and B****b**g Post Office as her mailing address whilst she was house sitting for us. I guess this assists with remaining uncontactable.
I have now taken over 250 photographs of the mess and the damage and intend to use them to support legal action against the house sitter. Whether we will ever get any financial recompense from the house sitter is problematical (our solicitor has advised us to save our money), but we hope by taking this action we will stop her from doing it to someone else in the future. We will certainly never use a house sitter again (our neighbours have made us promise not to! They have even said they will organise a roster to look after our animals when next we go on holidays.)
The total cost of the house sitter's actions to this date is over six and a half thousand dollars - not counting three weeks lost income for my wife and myself. But I'm sure it would have been more if we hadn't cut short our holiday.
Looking on the positive side: most of our animals and fruit trees survived, we have a lovely new calf, and we have learned some valuable lessons about people. We also discovered just how wonderful some of our neigbours are and how much we like living in this part of the world.
The story is not yet finished - there is still another week's work to finish cleaning and tidying up the place; there are insurance claims to be lodged and legal action to be pursued; and we have to go online each night to check our bank account (there is a cheque book missing). And we have to remain alert to the possibility of identity theft. But the worst is over and we can now start focussing on our plans for the future.