In the Beginning

Hi All,

My wife and I are looking into building our first home and we thought this would be a good way to document our Journey.

In the Beginning.

About a year or so ago my wife and I were looking to move out of our rental property. The main reason was due to the face that my wife was pregnant with our first child! Living in an area that has a very high turnover rate due to the close location to uni's, schools, and public transport further encouraged us to move as we wanted a more quiet and stable area to live in. We lived in the first of a two unit block and getting used to all the constant new neighbours and their noisy habits was getting tedious on us. The other motivating factor is the pain of watching a hefty sum of money pay someone else’s mortgage.

This sparked number of conversations and ideas of building bungalows, or extending my mother’s house back or up or both, but ideally we just wanted out of the rental at all costs. In the end we settled on an idea to renovate mums house with the plan of and selling and putting all our funds together. Off we all went and had a look at a number of display villages. We all decided on the Porter Davis Cayman as it gave us separate living areas that we could retreat to when needed. The up downstairs could easily be split for a two family type setup.

26th Feb 2011 - The renovations start.. Mums house needed a number of items fixed before we could enter the house into the market, roof repairs, full repaint, trees cut back, black berries cut and garage emptied of the 25 years or so of hording and other miscellaneous stuff that has been unattended to. So we went into home maker over mode, wife worked hard on cutting back away the black berries while she was pregnant. Her motivation of long term gain kept her going, but how sorry I felt for her cutting those things! I worked on cutting back tree's to open up the front of the house, and repainting all the trims and window frames. We worked nearly every weekend and every night doing repairs etc.

8th of May 2011 - Things started to change... We quickly realised that we bit off way more than we could chew. We got as far as completing the front yard fixed painting the eaves and trim, and then started to fix one of the bed rooms and then the out of nowhere the stress started to show with Mum. So we decided to pull the pin on that idea, if we can't handle the stress of a bit of reno’s how on earth could we all manage to go through the building process and then living together right? Haha...


My wife and I then looked at how we could do this venture on our own at this time, but the blow back from all the effort put into renovating, and mind you she put a huge amount of effort in while she was pregnant, and she'll never let me forget that either, never really gave us the motivation to look any further especially knowing that we weren’t getting the Cayman anymore. We parked the idea for a bit and worried more about the little one that was on the way.