Not exactly the start, but I have to start somewhere

We started this journey back in 2008 when I was made redundant from my job in March.  One of the advantages of being temporarily unemployed is the available time you have to go gallavanting around the countryside looking at vacant blocks of land.  A disadvantage, is having evidence of income when you find said block of land and want to buy it and further, build on it.  Fortunately, we have equity and I found a job.  Yes, even in the depths of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, some places were still hiring and Neil had retained his employed status throughout.  I had planned to be out of work for about 3 months, but it ended up being a little bit longer than that.  Enough said.

We bought "Sleepy Hollow" in December 2008 after looking at, I reckon, over 50 properties around Victoria.  Criteria - within an hour commute to the city, sealed road, creek frontage, quiet area, good views, acreage, planning permit for a dwelling, not too steep, with some established trees, no chance of losing our good views by future development, North facing house site, electricity available.  I wrote up a spreadsheet for 28 of the properties I looked at which had some potential, or at least fitted some of the criteria; listing pros and cons.  Some of the cons for us were "Boring, flat, no trees, no view", which to somebody else would have been an ideal block.

Sleepy Hollow didn't tick all the boxes, but we kept coming back to it, to compare other blocks against it.  In the end, we made an offer and it was accepted.  We immediately thought "Crap.  Should have offered less."

But we can't dwell on that.  We've got a 32 acre block with a fantastic Northern view, on a sealed road, in a quiet area.  It's a bit over an hour out from the city on V-Line and doesn't have a creek frontage, but it's ours (and the Commonwealth Bank's for a bit).

Before we get to buying the block though, there's a small back-story.  I had an idea in my mind's eye of the house I wanted to spend the rest of my life in.  It was not the house we were living in.  I broached the subject of moving out of the rat race to the quiet country and building this house of my dreams.  I was not met with complete refusal, so it was promising from the start.  I roughed out some ideas on paper for a floor plan and presented them to Neil.  Neil was very clear that he would be quite happy to live here where we are right now.  There was no reason to move as far as he was concerned.  But when I told him that I didn't see myself living in this house for the rest of my life, he was open to suggestions.  I started searching online for floor plans of houses.  I found www.eplans.com.  BEST WEBSITE EVER.  Not only did this have some really cool ideas for floor plans, it had pictures of the finished houses.  Neil is decidedly not an imagination person, so being able to show him what things looked like was fantastic.  I think the clincher was when I showed him the house with the balcony.

I found some free software called Envisioneer Express so I could draw up some floor plans using bits and pieces from the houses on the eplans website.  It was good fun and we had some animated discussions about good ideas and bad ideas.  We ended up with a floor plan that we were both happy with (as far as I know).

Friends of ours put me onto Google Sketch-Up so I could translate the floor plan into a 3D drawing of the finished house.  Yay technology!

Finding a builder is a story for another day, but suffice to say we broke ground on Tuesday to do the site cut for the house.  Neil and I were on site on Wednesday morning when the house and shed locations were set out on the site, to make sure they were going to be built where we wanted them and facing the right way.

It's all very exciting at the moment.  Oh, and I introduced our plumber to the idea of a pot filler tap. :)