In my heart of hearts I really thought it would be simple and pretty straight forward to buy some land and build a house in the country. Put in some gardens and grow some food, simplify our life and improve the day-to-day quality. We weren’t intending to build anything too grand, just big enough for our sons and partners to come back to for visits and not have to sleep in the bath.

If you can be wronger than wrong, that’s me. Bushfire controls which obviously are a good idea, make it tricky to build anywhere near trees, trees may house animals so everybody needs to know the exact genus of each tree on the 147 acres to ensure nothing rare is removed and no habitat is destroyed. You can’t build on a piece of land less than 150 acres in our area so that got tricky for a minute. If you build more than 200 metres from the road you need a second bushfire option. You can’t build within 74 metres of the boundary. Which further complicates the process. Particularly as this is an unusually shaped piece of land, much in the shape of a horses head.

So far we have had a Bushfire consultant to tell us where we could build, then an architect to design a home for that site, then a chat with council leading to a second bushfire consultant and an immediate relocation of the house site because it turns out we couldn’t build there at all. Then a redesign from the architect. Then a botanist to conduct a flora and fauna report including a thing called a SEPP44 which is a koala report, then a structural engineer and a geologist in cahoots to work out how best to build this modest house.

Then a new driveway so we can have safe access to the main road, which requires culverts and loads of asphalt and gravel. Of course that driveway needs to be robust enough to handle the cement trucks and friends that will eventually be delivering the building material.

All of this before council even considers the building application. It turns out it is not that simple to simplify ones life. If you would like to keep up to date with the progress, I am recording videos and they are up on YouTube Barjols Sth.