Choices!

We are still waiting for the final quote but have to pick out tiles, wall colours, carpet, and everything you can think of that is part of a house inside and out! 

Flooring choices are tiles, or vinyl not considering wood at this stage as I think it's out of out price range. Light or dark tiles? I can't decide. I know I don't want white floor tile. So there seems to be grey, black, coffee colour, chocolate, which to pick?  Then do you have the same tile in the whole house or another colour in the bathrooms laundry and toilet? 

Dulux paint for inside the house we can pick 3 colours or pay for more, so if we want every room different we pay. 

So thinking.

Catch up time!

                        

Well it's been a while since I posted last, we are in the Uk renovating our cottage there before putting it on the market. What a mess it was in, the tenants had made us a lot of work, but at least they left when their time was up.
As soon as it sells we are off back to Tasmania, can't come soon enough, the UK is in a right state!     

The good news is we sort of have a builder, not signed a contract yet but he is doing soil tests, contour survey, etc so the ball is rolling.

The bad news is we had to have a Bal assessment done, this is for bushfires, this is Australia wide and it determines what you can build with and adds costs on to your build because it add items to your house like thickened glass, fire screens, water tanks, etc and we got a Bal 29, not the worse one but will add another $20 grand or so on to the cost of the house.

So just waiting to hear back from the builder about the tests, the soil there is all sticky clay so I know it's going to be bad, as in extra costs.

On the up side we will start building the house in about 4 or 5 months!

Cheers until next time.

Still working on it!

Well we are still working on the house plan, got a quote today but it's out of our price range, I always thought it would be cheap to build in Tassie, but it seem we were very wrong, costs a lot more than building on the mainland.

Trying to sway hubby towards building a solar passive house , which he thinks is what mad greenies do, but maybe I will get lucky. I really want the main rooms facing north, the major problem is the we have  an amazing view to the west of the Huon River.

I am trying to come up with a plan that makes us both happy, will let you know how that goes.

A new start.

The story begins with us, John my husband and me, Lorri deciding to live in Tasmania. John is British and lived there all his life until I married him and we moved to Queensland. I was born in the UK too, but my family moved to Australia when I was 5, I sort of went back and forward though the years. After living in Queensland durning my first marriage and bringing up my kids there I moved back to the Uk where I met John. We lived in our little cottage then thought we should go live in Australia,the weather is better etc so off we went to Qld where nearly all my family live.
So we have lived at Victoria Point, a great place for nearly ten years and enjoyed it all except the summers.

Anyway after a stinking hot summer we said why are we doing this, you can't move without sweating, too hot to do anything etc. So we decided to move to Tassie when John retired, never been there before so booked a two week holiday for a look around to see what area we liked so we knew when we where ready to buy which areas we liked.

So we drove up the east coast of Tasmania, leaving from Hobart airport where we picked up a campervan for two weeks. We looked at a few places on the drive up there and loved Wineglass Bay and thought that that area was very nice.
So over the two weeks we drove up and down, never went over the west side as we didn't want to buy over there. There where so many beautiful places on the east coast, then we drove down to the bottom, and when we got to the Huon Valley we knew it was the spot we wanted to be.

So we looked at the real estate agent in Cygnet, and got a list of places we would go look at, and set off, as we only had two days before we had to fly back we thought at least we knew where to buy when we come back.
Then we went to look at some land in Cradoc, 5 acres of bush. As we turned off into the little road we realised it was on the Huon River front!  We drove up the road at the front and walked up the driveway it was so beautiful we said right away we want it!

So we rang the agent who told us sorry, it had been sold and she gave us another block to look at down the road but it was too hard to build on, so gave that idea up.
We rang the agent back and was told to put in a offer if we wanted as on the first block as the people had to sell their house first before they could buy it, which we did we raced back to the office and filled in the contract, we were leaving the next morning so it was a rush.

When we where at the airport got a message from agent saying we had the block! The people said they couldn't sell their house, so we are now the proud owners of a 5 acre bit of heaven.