Countrified

First of all, let me say that building a home out of a shed was not in our original, ‘dream home’ plan.

My Pinterest account is chock-full of pictures of gorgeous, country estate-style, weatherboard-and-verandah homes with cottage gardens and the mandatory cocker spaniel (or spoodle) lying on the front step. That has been mine and my husband’s tightly held vision of perfection for a very long time. Long before we actually bought a block of land to build on, we spent many happy evenings and weekends searching for pictures and house plans that might be ‘The One’ and even drove hours out of our way to look at kit home displays (you know, those ones that are replicas of Victorian or Federation homes, with high ceilings and picture rails and romantic verandahs).

This vision was alive and well when we first moved from Sydney to our tiny town near Canberra in 2009, but because I was heavily pregnant, we decided that buying land and building was not really a viable option at that point. Instead, we bought a lovely colonial-style brick home on half an acre and lived there very happily for five years. By then, we had added a second child to the family (another girl!) and the house was starting to feel a bit squeezy.

We were well-entrenched in our fantastic community by then and had no desire to leave, so the search (and wait) began for a block of land in or around the area.  That was early 2015 and, knowing that land came up infrequently and usually sold quickly, we decided to sell our house and rent until the right block appeared on the market.

Just six months later, we were very pleasantly surprised to find out that a five acre block on the edge of town was being subdivided, with two blocks to be sold off. We jumped on the biggest one – 1.6 acres – and then had to cool our heels for a further six months while the owners went through the process of subdividing the land. This was our first lesson in patience, with many more to come, as we were soon to find out.

While we waited, we consulted with, and then engaged, a friend who was a builder and designer to help us with our house design. We had already drawn up a federation-inspired design with what we felt was the perfect floor-plan, but didn’t quite trust ourselves, being the amateurs that we were, to have gotten it right or thought of everything.

Our friend liked our plan but was keen to show us an alternative. We agreed, and began what we were told was the first phase of a two-stage process (i.e. the Concept phase) to agree on a floor plan. The second stage would be the technical drawings, building method, etc. A few weeks before Christmas, we were close to finalising the first stage, when my husband became aware that his job may be made redundant in the new year. We didn’t know much more than that but, erring on the side of caution, we told our designer friend that we needed to stop the process there until we knew what was happening.

Unfortunately things went a bit pear-shaped at that point. Our friend advised us that we would need to pay for most of the second phase of the design work, because she had already completed most of it. Confusion reigned as we tried to understand how the technical drawings could be almost completed when we still hadn’t finalised the floor plan. We weren’t shown any of this work, and we were very reluctant to pay for something we didn’t get, but this was a friend and we wanted to ‘do the right thing’, so we sought advice from a trained architect that we knew, and others who had experience of building, and on their advice and our own gut instinct, we decided not to pay more than we already had.

It probably goes without saying that we parted ways there and have had no contact since. Ironically, when we took possession of our land on Christmas Eve 2015, we stood in the middle of our block, looked around, and realised that our original design was far better suited to the block and the aspect than the alternative plan we’d paid for, so there were a couple of lessons:

1. When it comes to designing your perfect home, read, research, look at lots of different options, and seek professional advice, but trust your instincts when it comes to what will work best for you and your family and lifestyle.
2. Think long and hard before mixing friendship with business. We thought everything would work out fine, so we had nothing in writing and in hindsight we realised that both sides had a very different understanding of what was involved and what had been agreed on.

The dream of building our perfect forever home was so close to being realised, but we were destined to wait almost another year before we would break ground.

Next: The Shed House – Part 2