My name’s Steve. My partner Judith and I retired about 7 years ago.
We used to do a lot of travel to occupy us, mainly to Asia and Europe, and when we were back in Aus we spent our time planning for upcoming trips. Then Covid hit and we had to stop all that. WA is a great place to live, and we’ve visited so much of it, but we miss travelling abroad.
The kids have left home and some are raising kids of their own and so we are well and truly ’empty nesters’. So, we started looking at moving from our home of 14 years now, the thought of downsizing seemed appealing. But all the houses we saw were too small for our tastes. We’ve been spoiled. Next, we thought it would be a great idea to move into the city or Mount Lawley, somewhere where we could just walk out and do a café strip, restaurants, bars, etc. But we didn’t see anywhere we liked, and location location location comes with a big price tag. We didn’t feel the value for money love there. Then we thought we would move out to the hills, and get a delux smaller pad close to restaurants and bars. Nothing jumped out there, in fact most were quite grotty. It became apparent that, what with the real estate boom we’ve been experiencing lately, the great places had already been sold and what was left was not going to cut it for us.
So, we had a crazy idea – why not inject a massive amount of work and pain into our lives by building from scratch. Judith had done that a few decades ago but I’ve never done it. We started looking around at houses, and liked the new, modern designs that are around now. I could also see a lower maintenance effort with the new houses – places we could just live in and enjoy rather than work at keeping nice. But it became apparent that it was the block that should drive the house. Elevation, aspect, size, width – all became factors we should consider before selecting a house. So, we started looking around for land, but at the same time keeping in mind the style of house we were considering.
After looking at different blocks, we favoured new developments. We liked the look of the Bushmead South Estate; it was close to Kalamunda which we like (has some great restaurants and bars), and it was new, modern living with walking trails and parks. We looked at a corner block originally but for various reasons settled on a nice bush-facing block that was flat and wide enough for the house designs that were bubbling in our heads.
This is going to be a big journey for us, so I started this blog to try to publish as much of our experiences as I can record. I’m a cynical old git sometimes, so bear with me (or don’t), and I hope you enjoy reading about our journey from the sand to the house warming party.