Ok so I know it’s been ANOTHER 16 months since my previous post, but this time things are actually progressing full steam ahead. There’s lots to catch up on, and lots in the pipeline. Here’s some brief updates to get you up to speed, and we’ll start posting with relative frequency in the coming months now that our project is starting to actually become worth writing about.
We got married!
It’s been a really busy year for us. We got married in February at the beautiful CERES in Brunswick, on the most perfect day we could have asked for, surrounded by our loved ones. It was nice to have a little distraction from our house project to focus on wedding planning for a bit, and we’ve been basking in the newly-married glow since.
We bought a forest!
This was unexpected. Our block in Deloraine is on the bottom half of a north-facing ridge, and directly behind it, on the other side of the road and running along the top half of the ridge, is a forest. It’s one of many factors that drew us to this block – the beautiful forestry backdrop for our property, and also the knowledge that there’s no one uphill from us that can send contaminated runoff towards our property. It was Council-owned land, and in our discussions with them when purchasing our block they assured us that the land would never be sold.
Fast forward to around this time last year – we took a weekend trip to Deloraine to show Patrick’s mum the area, and upon approaching our block we noticed “for sale” signs on the forest. Low and behold, Council was “offloading assets”, and the forest was one of them. This concerned us a great deal, as the land is zoned residential and is not protected and therefore can be clear-felled to build a house. The forest provides important habitat – we’ve seen wallabies, pademelons and echidnas, we know there’s wombats from their poop and we’ve heard at night either Tassie devils or quolls. There’s also kookaburras and wedge-tailed eagles which we want to stick around.
Without boring you with the details, we ended up purchasing the forest block in order to protect it. It was a pretty snap decision, but it was also incredibly serendipitous that we just so happened to visit the block within days of the sale signs going up, or we wouldn’t have known about it. We’re not exactly made of money, so this has been a significant blow to our budget. We’ve had to make some changes to our house building plans to reduce costs, and I’ve had to take on extra work. But we’re determined to make it work and we know it’ll be worth it in the end.
Strawbale house project
Our strawbale house project is finally gaining traction. It’s taken us two and a half years to get to this point where we finally have a commencement date. Patrick’s booked his move to Tassie – he’ll be heading down in September for an October kick off. My move is booked for January as I now have to work longer. We’ve had our earthworks completed, our shed is due for installation in May, and we’re hoping to have a building permit for the house by June. Full steam ahead!
