To Bring You Up To Speed….

As I mentioned in the first post we actually started thinking about building our own home several years ago – I’m picking most people have the same thought at least once in their life.

Yes, we have always wanted to have our own home built for us, yes we’ve thought long and hard about it, yes we have had thoughts and second thoughts but we’ve come to the realization there really is no ‘right time’.

One of the main things that for lack of a better term, encouraged us to build now was the Christchurch earthquake.  While we were comparatively lucky and our Fairford Street house was only cosmetically damaged, the prediction for Christchurch over the next several years during it’s rebuild is builders will be incredibly busy and the cost of material for building will almost definitely increase.  Add to the fact there is already more engineering required for things like foundations,  the overall cost of building will make it more challenging in the future.

Rather than share all the flowery stuff  I’ll just fill you in on a couple of milestone moments we had up to this point.

May 2011 – As we do (or did) regularly, we drove past a subdivision for a ‘tyre kick’ at sections we thought may be suitable to put a house on (More on what we looked for in a section in another post).

Made a conditional offer that was accepted subject to selling Fairford Street.

May/June 2011– Tidied up and made ready Fairford Street for sale.

June 2011 – Accepted an offer on Fairford Street

September 2011 – After sorting through the mine field of insurance transfer, red zone jitters and evolving selling processes caused by the quakes, offer goes unconditional on Fairford.

November/December 2011 – Selected a building company and worked through plans and ideas with them.  Much more on this later.

While we’re still waiting for consent which will be the most significant milestone for the build to date, we are carrying on selecting fixtures, fittings and colour schemes which has been easily the most enjoyable part to date.  The challenge will be keeping things within budget…….

First Things First

Standing on our blank canvas section

We should have started posting about this journey a couple of years ago but like most things of this nature, you don’t really know if the rainbow you are chasing is going to have  a pot of gold at the end.  Well, we believe there is gold in this case and that is in the form of our very own Holdsworth custom-fit home.

I thought I’d try something a little different to my usual form emails and instead try and flex my blog muscles and document online, what we are doing.  That way you choose whether or not you want to listen to my drawl about how much angst/fun getting your own home built is.

Of course my target audience is family and friends so apologies to those that have stumbled here by accident. Of course if you are not family but are curious, interested or just plain nosey than help yourself to viewing our ideas and results during our first attempt at building a home to meet the needs of a family of four living in Christchurch.