There is this special thing where we live and its called 'Mallacoota Time'. Basically this means things will happen when they are good and ready to happen and in turn this generally means at a very relaxed speed just like everything else in of this gorgeous seaside town in Far East Gippsland. I have to keep reminding myself that this is part of the charm of living by the beach, that life unfolds at it own pace with no need for the hustle and bustle of busy city life. The problem is when it comes to something as huge (and exciting) as building our dream home the old 'Mallacoota Time' trick wears thin pretty quickly.
My husband and I purchased our block of land, all 1 1/3 acres of it, back in July 2010 before he was even officially my husband. We'd been tossing around the idea of a new house for a while but needed to sell our current home to finance it, so we put it on the market and crossed our fingers. It must, at this point, be said that the real estate market in Mallacoota doesn't seem to follow any of the rules and completely has a mind of it own. With only a small population and despite hoards of people flocking to our quiet seaside village every summer for a holiday not a huge number of new people moving to town and therefore buying houses. So we knew not to hold our breath. As time went by with very little interest in our house, a house that we had our eye on sold before we got a chance to buy it and so it was back to the drawing board for us as we tried to decide what we wanted to do instead. It wasn't long before we reached the decision that what we actually really wanted to do was build our own home from scratch! So it was then that we began the hunt for a block of land to call our own and one day build our dream home on.
We knew that space was important to us and that we didn't want to be too far from the center of town. We also knew that we needed easy access as my husband is a diver and therefore needs to be able to access our block (in forwards and reverse) while towing his 23' boat. So when we came across a corner block in a small 13 lot no-thru-road subdivision we knew that was THE ONE for us.
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| Just the right one for us - July 2010 Note the millions of yellow cape weed flowers, we are going to have to do some serious work on balancing the ph of the soil down the track, not to mention Jason's arch enemy the Bracken Fern. He has taken a serious disliking to it, even to the point where he has dragged our trusty old push mower across town to battle it. I keep telling him will will deal with it when we move in but he wont listen and is intent and waging war on it now! |
It was so exciting as we started dreaming of what we could build but then there was the hurdle of finding someone to build it. Mallacoota as I mentioned before is small and therefore options are limited. We spent the next couple of years looking at every display house we could whenever we went out of town, until my husband was nearly ready to scratch his own eyes out, as we waited for our current house to sell so we could finance the build. All the time dreaming of the possibilities, and well aren't they just endless when it comes to building from scratch. We had a bit of an idea of what we wanted as far as the floor plan was concerned so we started with a HUGE kitchen and pantry for me (I'm a chef by trade, therefore enjoy spending a lot of time cooking) and an even BIGGER outdoor area for Jason. Our ideas evolved from there, we wanted 4 bedrooms, an office to run our business from and two (not three as so many plans seem to have) living rooms, one for the TV and huge big comfy couch and the other for our pool table. On yet another display home excursion I'd dragged my slightly reluctant husband along on we found the most amazing house! It ticked box after box on our theoretical list of 'must haves' albeit with a million and one things I would also change about it. But nevertheless this seemed to be the starting point we needed.
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| Sorry about the less than perfect quality. If I remember correctly this was a very quick pic with my phone through the display glass. Even still you can get an idea of what we started with. |
The next thing was to find out whether the builders would even consider traveling the almost 3 hours to build in Mallacoota. Up until this point we had had the same negative response from every builder we'd spoken to when we said our block was in Mallacoota. But this time was different, this was the very first time we were told "yeah that's defiantly something we could possibly be interested in". Needless to say we were pretty excited by this. We weren't at this point ready to actually start building but just needed to find someone who would when the time came. We continued saving and as time went by, still without the sale of our current house (please if you or anyone you know is interested in a holiday house at the beach check out ours at http://www.domain.com.au/2-howden-court-mallacoota-vic-3892-2008847947 ), we got closer and closer to being able to build anyway.
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