Six months have flown by. We’ve been talking with a friend who is an architect since April and he’s been so helpful in getting us to the point we’re at now.
In short: we’ve gone through the phases of dreaming about a perfect house and then coming back to earth with a thud. Building a house is so expensive! You think of all the many things you’d like in your house. You think big and start to believe that bigger equals better. You think about having a media room, a room for every single child you might have one day, a massive scullery, a wet room, a …. the list goes on.
Then you find out there’s a thing called cost per square metre and it keeps going up each year. So you wonder about alternative building methods – like building from dirt or hay or anything that doesn’t cost a ridiculous amount. Then you worry about how much man-power is involved, how many millions of decisions you need to make in order to get the house you’re wanting.
Then you come back to earth and start asking the big questions. What’s important, really? Can you choose to be happy wherever you are? What’s the most important things in a home? Square meterage or a warm dry house in winter and a comfortable place in summer? Having everything perfect and a massive mortgage or having money to give to others when they need it, and some spare to do fun things in life?
Back to square one. Time was ticking by. A desire to be living on the land grew by the day.
I spent many evenings Googling away for alternative options. Regan spent time reading a book on alternative building methods. We’re both just so busy that we needed to find a solution that wasn’t going to mortgage us up to the eyeballs (even though we could get the money from the bank, should we?) but would be something customised for the land we bought. Something which was unique and we could have a hand in the end result, but without having to project manage the whole thing. Something which was a good combination between what we wanted and someone else’s good design taste.
In my endless searching I came across Box Living which seemed to embody the traits I was hunting for: something somewhere between a fully-architectural designed house and a building company design where you don’t get too much say. Having built my web design business on the phrase “clean, clear and creative”, Box Living seemed to be an answer out of the blue: modular design, architecturally inspired, environmental considerations, certainty of cost and flexibility.
After reading absolutely everything that their website had to offer and Googling every single reference to the company, we gave them a call and met with them two days later.
I was expecting to go into their offices, but Dan Heyworth was keen to come out to our place and chat over a cup of tea. He was fascinated by all the variety of books on our coffee table that we’re reading – from “The Shallows” to the new Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. We talked for an hour or so about things like Natural Flow, leaky homes (my dad is worried about a flat roof) and TV projectors! It was nice to talk with someone who also had a young family and didn’t mind our little 9 month old needing a bit of attention during the meeting.
After talking through lots of bits and pieces, we arranged to meet up a couple of days later at our land with Dan Heyworth and Box Living’s architect Tim Dorrington…