.
Act one, Scene one, The Story Begins........
Ignore the "For Sale" sign..Rip off the "Sold" sticker, Pull it out of the ground altogether............
As of last Tuesday (7th June 2011) we're officially the proud owners of 664 M2 of land at Blackwood Park.
We currently have a large (5 bedroom / Lounge / Dining / Family / Pool / Spa) house that we built so many years ago with A.V. Jennings.
It's been a good house and it's served us well, but now Girl-Child is married and we suspect Boy-Child won't be too far behind, it's time to consider, as they say, "Downsizing".
We've been looking around for "The" place for a couple of years now, we've considered buying a smaller house closer to the city, we've considered buying a "knock-down" house and we've considered the "build from scratch" approach within the same "general" price-range.
A smaller house close to the city in our price-range would invariably be an older house in need of much additional (bathroom / kitchen / structural) time, effort and money to bring it up to an "as new" standard.
We were unable to find a knock-down and rebuild in our price-range in the areas we were looking at.
In the areas we were looking at, the house prices (for the land) was a significant percentage of our budget.
Hence we always seemed to come back to the "Building" option.
Maybe the writing was on the wall a couple of years ago, we (very, very) briefly had a block on hold on Highfield Drive, Blackwood Park, until we found out that it had "significant" trees on it !!
Then not too long ago Mrs P_D came home and said that she'd seen a great block at Blackwood Park.
We had a look, and another look, and looked yet again, and ended up finding two blocks that would suit us.
However, one of them was designated a "Premium" block, and as such had a requirement that you had to build a very large house on it. Did I mention that the object here is for us to "Downsize" ??
That and a couple of other things led us back to the block she had originally seen.
We put a hold on it, thought about it, and decided to go ahead with the purchase.
Things happen as they do, and it was a few more weeks before both us and the agent were able to meet and do the paper-work.
The rest, as they say, is history !
Hopefully this post will anchor our little place on the Interweb where we can tell of our joys and sorrows, of our uplifting experiences and our disappointments, of our trials and tribulations and of our pieces of gold !!!!
Cheers,
P_D.