Tram-Masters Cottage

We try to offer comfortable accommodation and warm hospitality! You have your own room (no sleeping in refurbished shipping containers or dank rooms here), but sometimes we have to swap bedrooms around depending on who is staying (the kids/my partner/family etc).

We have built up a helper’s book over time with lots of suggestions of things you can do around Newcastle and we also have a range of brochures.

If you’d like to be involved in our life and projects, send us a message and we can hopefully get to know each other better in the coming weeks and months.

So come and stay, it’s a great life and a great place to stay

Who are we looking for?
Fun people who enjoy getting into a renovation project - at the moment we are particularly looking for:
- Couples so we have an extra set of hands to move materials
- People with building experience - its not mandatory just really beneficial.

and on the dream list
- Africans, South Americans and Western Europeans - just because we haven't had many from there before (actually we don't mind where you're from - so far everyone we have had has been great with cool experiences to share.

Looking forward to meeting you soon.

Andrew, Annalise and Liam

We live in the Newcastle suburb of Waratah, about 15 minutes drive from the beach. It has a local shopping centre with Coles and K Mart and about 10 other little shops. At the moment we are renovating the house that we live in but you will have your own room, and the house bathroom and kitchen are all functional (and stating to look quite nice). It has a really nice pool too and there is an indoor deck looking over the pool and facing east which is really nice in the morning sun. Your room is at the back of the house and has a queen-sized bed, a desk, bedside tables and a lamp plus various hooks around the room to hang your things on. Our house is joined (via a common rear deck) to our neighbour, so we sometimes need to keep the noise down. We have NBN internet which is pretty good and achieves 50-10 Mb/s (good for Zoom and Skype). One of the great things is getting to know the kids (they're late teenagers now) and teaching and learning from them about how a household runs in Australia, including the strange beetles, spiders, snakes, etc that live here (not in our house though ! ). I love learning languages, (although I'm not that great at any other than English yet), but I'm more than happy the help you our with your English picking up grammatical error to make your English sound more natural (and learn some words of your language too!). Generally we are looking for people who are going to fit in with our family. People who are: Independent, friendly, hardworking, willing to work in the team to get things done and solve problems. One of the biggest things is people who have some life experience and know how to help out without direct instruction.