Hi,
Thank you for taking the time to visit our first build blog post.
Eric and I have been married almost 28years and have three gorgeous, busy adult kids. Until they all got their licences, we though our calling in life was to be unpaid Uber drivers, bankers, chief justices, waiters, alarm clocks, magicians, cheerleaders and curfew managers.
(I sometimes wonder how peaceful Eric’s life would have been if he hadn’t married me. Ha Ha!)
Eric works in IT and has a passion for canoeing down the Zambezi in his native Zimbabwe. I have worked as stylist, artist, short term holiday property owner, jack of all trades and serial renovator. I think I studied design so I could have the upper hand in design decisions on our projects. Eric is practical and I am all about the look & feel or what they call “the creative one”.
We’re no strangers to hard work and love to throw ourselves at lots of different projects.
Our latest project has been a labour of love. On July 20th 2019, we sold the family home that we’d built from scratch and had lived in for 10 years. It was our third home together but my 30th move. So, we set our sights on doing another project – a reno or a new build.
What we thought the process would be a two-year project. Thanks to Covid, unfortunately it’s turning out to be closer to a four year project and has created a few more grey hairs in the process.
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- Renovator’s delight!
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- Our inspiration
We’ve always worked on lots of renovations, commercial shop fit outs & new build projects together. So, when we purchased the red brick renovators delight in October 2019, we were so excited to change the layout. We thought we would go up & go down to make the build a four-bedroom 3 level home with multiple living areas.
The design for the renovation was submitted to council and approved in lighting speed. Then came the road to disappointment. After getting the quotes back from all the trades to do the build, the cost to renovate this home was not going to give a great return on investment. We also ended up with a single car garage. This really didn’t sit well with both of us.
So back to the drawing board. We researched high end volume build companies. (I’ll go through that process in another blog post).
Around one year later (thank you Covid) new plans for a knock down and rebuild were submitted to council.
And then once again (thank you Covid) almost one year later we had our plans approved.
We now have the mindset that we must just focus on the build & get to the finishing line. The house is going to be something special. We seriously can’t wait to move in.
I hope you come along for the ride.
Cheers
Kym & Eric