Stumbled on this forum and well it looks exactly what I've been looking for.
My wife and I are late 30's empty nesters who've spent all of this century in Sydney before a few yucky years up at Lismore (time machine anyone?). Around a month ago we moved a few hundred km south to Coffs Harbour and we love things here so have decided to buy/build ASAP.
We're presently torned between buying existing or running the gauntlet of building our own. Perhaps like many other folks we always considered building our own 'too hard' and fraught with peril - hence the safer path of buying existing was what we'd psyched ourselves into expecting.
However the property market here just hasn't really impressed us that much - despite some discounting in pricing we've not seen much that takes our fancy. Hence we've recently swung around to leaning towards locating some suitable land and building on it. So this has opened up a completely new can of worms for us as it's not something we've ANY familiarity with and hence we're here.

We're leaning towards getting a couple of acres around 10-15mins out of town - probably at the developments just north of Coffs Harbour. However I've absolutely no idea how much to budget on the house construction - I guess its a bit of how long is a piece of string eh.
Anyway have a million questions and then a few more....am quite handy myself and would like to do as much as I can myself to save on costs where possible however am NOT looking at owner-building as I think thats a bridge too far for me.
On a positive note- all our finances are very healthy (despite me not working at present) so we're able to action anything immediately.
If anyone know of some great stickies or posts here to read over I'd welcome it - otherwise do anticipate a multi-question posting from me soon.
Thanks in advance to all.
Cheers,
Nick
