Home Sweet Home
We've done it! After two months of driving back and forth across the great state of Victoria, we have our block: 11 and a half acres of lightly-treed, partially-cleared land, on a gentle, north-facing slope, with a hundred-year-old miner's cottage, a shearing shed and chicken coops. It's perfect.
I mean- it's not perfect...
The quaint miner's cottage is sadly not liveable: the ceilings are caved in in several places and the floorboards are basically planks of dry rot held together with cobwebs and dust. The whole place is quite literally rotting into the ground and will have to be torn down. Luckily, the local quadbike gangs* have already started the job for us and the exterior walls have large holes in them where anything of value has been ripped from the carcass of the building (including, devastatingly, an original, cast-iron, roll-top claw-footed bathtub. SMH).
The shearing shed is as bad, if not worse-off: a collapsing structure, it consists of a few upright posts and rusted-out corrugated iron, housing a collection of ancient horse tack, farm equipment and sinister-looking tins of christ-knows-what.
The block itself is smack dab in the middle of the BMO, which means it's an area prone to wildfires. It's a big old bit of dried up, dusty dirt, in the middle of which, a ring of scorched earth is littered with smashed rum bottles and beer bottle caps. Under a fallen tree is an obsolete fridge and a plastic bath, overflowing with more empty glass bottles and here and there lie rolls of rusty fencing, barbed wire and rubber tubing.
As if all of that isn't enough, there are three separate places on the land which could potentially be abandoned mine shafts. Or plague pits. And I don't know which to hope for.
All in all, it would be fair to say that we've got quite a lot of work ahead of us. Luckily we both have abundant skills and knowledge which we can lean on to help us as we build our dream home. (Just kidding. I don't think that being able to plan a scheme of work for English applying the principles of Understanding by Design is going to help us here).
*Disclaimer: Not all quad bikers are in organised crime gangs.
I mean- it's not perfect...
The quaint miner's cottage is sadly not liveable: the ceilings are caved in in several places and the floorboards are basically planks of dry rot held together with cobwebs and dust. The whole place is quite literally rotting into the ground and will have to be torn down. Luckily, the local quadbike gangs* have already started the job for us and the exterior walls have large holes in them where anything of value has been ripped from the carcass of the building (including, devastatingly, an original, cast-iron, roll-top claw-footed bathtub. SMH).
The shearing shed is as bad, if not worse-off: a collapsing structure, it consists of a few upright posts and rusted-out corrugated iron, housing a collection of ancient horse tack, farm equipment and sinister-looking tins of christ-knows-what.
The block itself is smack dab in the middle of the BMO, which means it's an area prone to wildfires. It's a big old bit of dried up, dusty dirt, in the middle of which, a ring of scorched earth is littered with smashed rum bottles and beer bottle caps. Under a fallen tree is an obsolete fridge and a plastic bath, overflowing with more empty glass bottles and here and there lie rolls of rusty fencing, barbed wire and rubber tubing.
As if all of that isn't enough, there are three separate places on the land which could potentially be abandoned mine shafts. Or plague pits. And I don't know which to hope for.
All in all, it would be fair to say that we've got quite a lot of work ahead of us. Luckily we both have abundant skills and knowledge which we can lean on to help us as we build our dream home. (Just kidding. I don't think that being able to plan a scheme of work for English applying the principles of Understanding by Design is going to help us here).
*Disclaimer: Not all quad bikers are in organised crime gangs.
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