Thursday 12 November 2020

Building a house

This has been an expat blog, a motherhood blog, a running blog, and now it's going to become a building a house blog.

Yes, je retourne!

We are about to start building a house, and as much as I want to be cool and not talk about it constantly, it's pretty exciting and I am not cool. I want to share every step forward, however small, because it feels like it's taken forever to get to this point. Rather than clog everyone's Facebook and Instagram feed with constant updates I thought, "The blog!" Of course!

My last post was from early March, right before New Zealand went into lockdown. We ended up staying home for about nine weeks I think. But this story starts a lot longer ago, back when we were still living in Perth in 2016, when we bought this block of land (or section, as they call it in NZ).

The shape and size of the block/section lent itself to subdivided, we thought. The little house by the road, where we currently live, is a great little house but it has its limitations. We could subdivide and build our dream home further back from the road.  We were duly warned that the subdivision process would be difficult and it certainly was, and lengthy, and expensive. We initiated the process in winter 2018. It was at the end of lockdown this year, almost two years later, that we finally got the news from our surveyor that the subdivision had been approved and we could really start to think about the dream home. Lots of planning, research, consents, paperwork, quotes...

Fast forward to now, and the driveway earthworks are happening as I type.

(I apologise in advance that I cannot get these photos to line up nicely!)

Yes. It's a long driveway! 180m to be exact.

But! Before the driveway could be formed, the power transformer had to be upgraded...



And before the transformer could be upgraded, the power cable and water pipes had to be laid...



And before the pipes and cables could be laid, the trench had to be dug...


So over the past couple of months all that work has been done, and now we're here:


The top soil has been scraped back, and now the engineer is taking samples, or testing something, I think? And then the driveway gets made.

And then, THEN! We start on the house!! Well, actually I think the shed comes first, but the point is, we start building! There will be structures! Where once there were none!




No comments:

Post a Comment