Hi. I’ve only recently found this forum and I think it will be a fantastic resource for us over the next 2 years, so I’ve decided to document our OB journey here as well. We’ve actually been on this (incredibly slow) journey for about a yr already so I’ll do a few posts to come up to speed. We bought our property about 3 yrs ago and are currently living in a very dilapidated pre-1940s asbestos ‘cottage’ on the front of the block. The property is a 1.5 acre bush block in Maida Vale (perth foothills) about 25min from the city centre. We’d always dreamed on owning our own creek and this block has 2 of them, winding straight through the middle of our property. The 2 creeks join and form an island right in the middle of the block. We spent the first 2 yrs building a chook yard, 2 bridges over the creek, doing some major weed eradication, revegetating the native understorey, and basically getting a good feel for the block and how we wanted to live on it. We then designed our new house ourselves and had a draftie draw it up for us.
We have a very restricted building envelope to build on as we had to fit it between the existing house, 15m setback from the creek and a 6m setback from the side boundary plus a 3m embankment/cliff right next to the house. Hence the floor plan is an unconventional L shape. Probably not to everyone’s taste but it’s exactly how we want it and maximizes out views of the creek.
(I've just tried attaching some photos but it says "board attachment quota reached". How do you attatch photos & plans??)