House Hunting

We decided to buy a home. Well, I decided that a really long time ago, it just took a while to get Purple on board with the idea ;)

My dream is to find some large lot, at least 25 acres, with a live-able house, and room to build a few cabins or put caravans, yurts, tipis, etc and have a kind of mini-community. I want to have lots of lush rainforest, sweet water to drink and swim in, and people to come live with us. Purple would rather be in town, and Littletree doesn't care as long as we can be near her friends. Hopefully we can find something that will work for all of us.

We looked at so many places this week my head is spinning from them all! It's keeping me very busy anyway, talking with real estate agents, trawling the property listings, going to look at houses and land.

First there was the block over the road from where we live now - it has a run-down cabin, three times the size of our house now, and gets rental income from a cafe at the front of the block. cons? It's only 10 acres, and has no permanent water source; just rain tanks. It's very affordable though.

Then we looked at a place a few minutes further up the road from us. It's on 24 acres of rainforest bush, with spring water (no swimming hole or creek though), and a really gorgeous house.

Cons? The land is all thickly forested and steep - not really any useable land for anything, so no room for other people to come and live there. Which means we can't afford it.

We saw another place a little further up the road. 25 acres of pristine rainforest land, with a small creek and a cabin. The land is absolutely beautiful, but the cabin would need a LOT of work to make it inhabitable - the deck and 3rd bedroom have rotted away, and there's a tree growing up through the bathroom.

Still, the cabin could be fixed up, and there's a fantastic flat house site just a little way down the hill that we could build on, as well as a couple of other spots that could host caravans or yurts. It's also very affordable. Cons? it needs loads of work, we'd have to put a lot of money into fixing it up and it's bordering on "too far" from town.

There's the compromise place; a really 'nice,' new, 3 bedroom house 2 acres on the outskirts of town. Purple really likes the house, though I find it to be characterless. The back of the property is a small pocket of beautiful bush land with some massive old-growth trees, and there's about an acre of cleared space below the house. cons? we couldn't really do much in the way of having people live with us, and about a quarter of the land is an unusable wetland gully.

We even looked at a few of places in town. Nice little suburban blocks with neat suburban houses.

There's still loads to look at; today we're going to see a place on the other side of town; 100 acres with a gorgeous wooden house on it. I did find the dream place already; 235 acres of old rainforest, with creeks, springs and waterfalls. It would be perfect. Only we can't afford it on our own. Anyone have a spare $300K and we can buy it together!