"The Vision"

Here I will be documenting our journey from vacant half acre block to beautiful and productive homestead. Our vision is to have a sustained way of life still within half an hour of the city. We want the whole lot; chooks, veges, fruit trees, aquaponics and all the fun our little hobby farm has to offer. Our ideal in this consumer driven society is to be near self sufficient or at least to learn enough to one day fulfill our dream of doing this..What more of a lifestyle could our young ones want for than homegrown food and outdoor lifestyle..exciting!!


We are blessed enough to be building next door to our lovely family who will be sharing this entire process with us. They have the half acre next door to us and have similar visions for their land too. We both have young children and really want them to experience nature and growing up eating produce straight from the land. I'm sure they will all have a wonderful childhood with this choice we have made, and what more could a parent ask for? Mucky happy little monsters.
(This bit is borrowed from Nics page, but rather than rewrite it..)

The house...

This is a 2 story reverse living home. Our main living is on the 2nd floor to take in the full valley views all day and night long. The kids are all down stairs with their own kitchenette and living area. 
This is the AREA of house build

GROUND FLOOR: 94.71M
PORICO: 3M
DECKING: 21:05M

UPPER FLOOR: 108M
VERANDAH: 29.11

TOTAL 256M

The story so far:
Saw plans through Total Home Frames and decided on the 'Colonial' but with afew tweaks. We raise the roof to be a Cathedral ceiling on the top floor to allow floor to ceiling windows for the views.  All up from the time we approached them to when we signed the contract was about 4 months. Alot of that was waiting for the drafty to redo plan ect and work out what house design we could put on the block with out having to do any retaining and not being over height. 
We are really happy with what they have come back with and now that plans are in council, we are hoping not too long tbough.
We have had to organise our own cut into the land quotes which will be about .5 mtrs. We've also had to organise our own septic and subfloor drainage works. We are using an earthworks company called Joyce Earthworks they seem to be the best in the area.
We will commence these works once building plans are approved. 
The company building Total Home Frames will be building both homes at the same time on the block.

Plans to council...

We have bought a subdivisiable 1 acre block with my brother and his wife in Greenmount and will be building 2 houses on it then seperating the titles. My hubbie and I are on half the acre and they are on the other.  We have both decided to build a pole home with Total Home Frames. We are buiilding 2 story custom design and they are building a queenslander type single.  We decided on a pole home as the the earthwork quotes were ridiculous (try 80k) as it has a slight slope and some clay activity.  With this pole home company the prices you see are what you get...no added earthworks... so went happily with them as also really loved their designs.
We have just signed our building contracts and plans have just been put into council. We hope to have them out of council in 7 weeks. Build takes about 12 weeks for a pole home.  Hoping to be in the house by January 2011...but hey we'll see.
I thought I would do this blog as I haven't seen many blog about building a pole home. I will put up  some photos of our block and plans soon.
We are very excited to be able to do with with our family as our kids can now grow up together.
Anyhow...first blog I've ever done in my life, I hope someone gets something out of it along the way.