Join to Reply Addington, VIC

WE ARE IN URGENT NEED OF A LONG TERM HOUSE SITTER, IMMEDIATELY. We are currently in Europe, and the house sitter who started with us 3 weeks ago has had to return home.
We are offering 3 months in our brick home on 0.9 hectare, 15 minutes from Ballarat, and 90 minutes from Melbourne. Our small village has few amenities, but is a welcoming community which you could become part of. Ballarat has everything you would need: shopping, restaurants, theatres, hospitals, sporting facilities, and we are within 2 hours of some of Victoria's major tourist highlights.
We have no cats or dogs, but do have birds. In our fully enclosed orchard are currently 9 hens, 2 roosters and a lady turkey. If you let them out to forage in the garden, they will follow you back home in the evening as if you were the Pied Piper, knowing that you will provide their daily serving of grain. In the back paddock live 2 ducks. We let them out of their house every morning, so that they can play on the dam. Then at night, they need to be herded back inside, away from the foxes. We would have no objection to your heading off as tourists for one or two nights at a time, leaving the flock safely locked in, to check out the Great Ocean Road, or Bendigo, or the Grampians, or to a late show in Melbourne. The ducks might get cross, but they'd get over it, and you would get to know our region better.
You will need a thick skin and lots of woolly jumpers. Ballarat is not known for its wonderful winters, the weather being primarily cold, drizzly and windy, so there will not be the opportunity for much gardening, though ride-on mowing may be needed by August. We have gas powered central heating (we would ask for payment for the gas you use, as it is rather expensive), and a wood fire. We have wifi, and lots of jigsaw puzzles, and Ballarat has an excellent library, so you might just prefer to hibernate. We ask that you don't bring a dog, as we have farm animals over the fence.