Henderson Residence, Brimsdown Road, Davoren Park

Signing the Lease

The Henderson residence was the rented house at 6 Brimsdown Road, Davoren Park, where Daniel and Melanie Henderson made their family home from March 2012. They signed the lease when their son Riley was seven months old, moving from a cramped two-bedroom unit in Elizabeth East that had been fine for a couple and hopeless for a pram.

The house was an old three-bedroom Housing Trust design of brick and weatherboard on a corner block, owned by a retired couple from Gawler named Kowalski, who managed it through an Elizabeth real estate agent. The rent was manageable on Daniel's wage from the car-parts supplier in Elizabeth, the yard was big enough for children, and the polished jarrah floorboards made Melanie fall in love with the place on the first inspection. Daniel was more interested in the carport and the distance to work. Both of them knew within ten minutes that they would take it.

Making It Home

The Hendersons furnished the house the way young families on one and a half incomes did: with hand-me-downs from both sets of parents, a floral sofa and armchair from a Gawler op shop, and flat-packed shelves that Daniel assembled with more patience than skill. Melanie threw turquoise and coral throws over everything, partly for colour and partly to hide the stains, and the lounge became the centre of the household.

The front bedroom was theirs. The second became Riley's, and then Riley and Ella's once Ella was born in May 2013. The third, briefly a sewing and storage room, became Maddie's nursery in January 2015. Rugs went down on the floorboards in the lounge and the children's rooms. The hallway was left bare, and the children learned to skid along it in socks before they could properly run.

The fridge door was the household's noticeboard and gallery. School notices, appointment cards, children's drawings and photographs went up under a growing collection of magnets, and the front window filled with crayon pictures taped to the glass for passing neighbours. Melanie hung a string of small bells on the inside of the front door so that she could hear the children going in and out from anywhere in the house.

A House Full of Children

By the middle of the decade the house ran on noise. Toys migrated through every room. The coffee table disappeared under colouring books, library books and half-eaten snacks, and the kitchen bench under dishes. A wicker basket of half-folded washing became a permanent fixture beside the sofa. The family cat, Tinkerbell, adopted from a neighbour's litter in 2014, claimed the good couch and set about scratching it to pieces.

Daniel built a sandpit in the backyard in 2015 and bought a second-hand trampoline in 2016. The children spent long summer evenings outside under the old lemon-scented gum on the front corner of the block, while Daniel watered the patchy couch grass and Melanie talked over the fence to whoever was passing.

The neighbours became part of the household's life. Kerry Nguyen, two doors along, took the children when Melanie had appointments and brought round leftovers after family gatherings. It was Kerry who invited Melanie to the Wednesday playgroup at the Craigmore meetinghouse of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2017, and from then on the house had a steady stream of visitors from the Playford Ward: sister missionaries teaching lessons at the kitchen table, visiting teachers drinking cocoa in the lounge, and Relief Society sisters dropping off casseroles and craft supplies.

The Lean Years

Daniel's redundancy in August 2017 changed the house's mood. The rent, once manageable, became a monthly worry, and for a while Daniel's casual and night-shift work meant he slept in the front bedroom during the day while Melanie tried to keep three children quiet around him. Arguments about money, and later about the tithing Melanie paid to the Church, were mostly held in low voices in the kitchen after the children were in bed.

The pandemic of 2020 shut the whole family in together for weeks. The children did their schoolwork at the kitchen table, Daniel's shifts dried up for most of April and May, and the household lived for a time on government payments and food parcels. Priesthood holders from the ward brought the sacrament to the front porch on Sundays, and Daniel watched from the kitchen. It was a hard stretch, and the house, too small for five people at home all day, felt it.

Landlords and Repairs

As tenants, the Hendersons learned the ordinary frustrations of renting an old house. The hot water system failed in the winter of 2014 and again in 2019, leaving the family boiling kettles for baths for the best part of a week each time before the Kowalskis replaced it. Cracks opened along the western wall during the dry summer of 2019 and were patched rather than fixed. Daniel did most small repairs himself rather than wait for the agent.

In 2021 the Kowalskis sold the house to a new investor, and for a few anxious weeks the family did not know whether their lease would be renewed. It was, but the rent went up twice in the following three years. The new owner did replace the original kitchen in 2023 with a white laminate kitchen and a dishwasher. Melanie described it as the single greatest improvement in her domestic life, and Daniel said it was the first time in eleven years he had seen the kitchen bench.

Brimsdown Road in 2026

Through 2026 the Hendersons were still renting 6 Brimsdown Road. The children had outgrown the arrangement of the bedrooms. Riley, at fifteen, had the third bedroom to himself, and Ella and Maddie shared the second, not always peacefully. The trampoline had been given away, the sandpit had become a vegetable patch that grew mostly tomatoes, and Tinkerbell, by then twelve and slow, slept most of the day on the good couch she had spent a decade destroying.

The hallway floorboards were scuffed down to bare timber, the bells still rang on the front door, and the fridge still carried a crowded mosaic of photographs, school notices and craft-night magnets. Buying a house of their own remained a plan the family talked about more often than they could afford to act on.