To build, or not to build

Because we love where we live, we first looked around here for a suitable 'replacement home'. This is what we found:

• there is limited housing / building blocks as it is in the middle of a national park;
• existing houses are either just as big and cumbersome as our own, or old fibro shacks from the days when the area was a commune;
• vacant land was even more scarce and heinously expensive.

We rapidly dismissed the idea of buying one of the big, bespoke houses as a big, bespoke house was what we already have.
We toyed with the idea of buying one of the old shacks...but the cost of renovating an existing house is far more per square metre than building a new home home from scratch. And Viktoria stubbornly refused to live onsite in a shed.
We explored and rejected the ideas of buying vacant land after researching pre-fabs, relocating an old house, getting an architecturally designed place on the grounds of being not all that flexible, unsuitable or even more heinously expensive.

TIP Make sure all parties are on the same page. It sounds obvious, but make sure the other person is really saying what you think they are saying. Don't make assumptions.

By going through these often laborious and sometimes depressing steps, it helped us realise that what we were looking for in a home had to be:

• functional for our dysfunctional lifestyles
• able to offer increased self-sufficiency and sustainability (we are already grid-connect solar, rainwater only and biocycle waste management, but we want more!)
• a smaller footprint of usable space
• out of suburbia
• cost effective so it wouldn't send us to the cleaners

We weren't going to find that here.
We would have to move our explorations further afield.
And that was when we decided to venture outside the sub-tropics, and look to the mystical island state of Tasmania.