It occured to me that I haven’t posted a lot this year about my personal life and what has unfolded do it’s time I gave an update.
At the end of 2009 my lady and I were living [and still are] in a small three bedroom cottage on the side of the hill in Ferntree Gully. Between us we have six kids, her a boy and a girl, me two boys and two girls, a regular Brady Bunch without the Alice – the three boys are the oldest and the girls the youngest and whilst I say kids they range in age from 17 up to 26. At the time my lady’s two were living full time with us and my youngest daughter stayed every second weekend. My second son, having lost his job earlier in the year and having to vacate the place he was renting because he couldn’t pay also needed somewhere to live.
So we sat down and discussed everything with the four who wanted to live with us and said that they were welcome to stay and save for their own place for as long as they liked but we needed to look at extending our place and put on at least a couple of more bedrooms.
We started visiting display homes to get some ideas about what we could do or what we wanted to do and then made some enquiries with architects about the price of an extension and it turned out that it was going to be cheaper to build a new place from scratch than it was to extend where we are.
The decision then became about finding a block of land to build on and after exhaustive searching around the Gully and around the general vicinity of where we currently are, we came to the conclusion that land was either too expensive in this area or the terrain meant that the site costs were prohibitive.
So after returning from holiday in Narooma in January and after continuing the search for a suitable 5 bedroom home we ended up buying a block of land on a cow paddock in Cranbourne North. That land was supposed to title in August but as I sit here now in early November we still do not own it but have been told that we will get the title by the end of this month.
We had originally decided to build the Marina 42, a five bedroom, two storey place, by Porter Davis, but in the next few months my lady’s two kids moved out, my number two son moved in and we decided that it was stupid to pursue a five bedroom place when we didn’t need it anymore. The search continued and we have now settled on a house called the Monaco 36 by Carlisle.
And now we’ve gone from a cow paddock to a full blown housing estate with house popping up like mushrooms and with any luck we’ll start building next month.
The full story is being told on my lady’s blog Destination 3977. Please drop by and let her know you came from here.
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