Underway

It's been a short couple of months from a vague inkling of an idea to today, and looking back there is no way we could have known that we would be where we are today, but, well, here we are!

We signed our contract last week, on Tuesday to be precise, and our DA went in on Friday, so the ball is well and truly rolling, though it's a strange feeling as we aren't actually doing anything to assist it, so we're sort of out of the loop. Everything is happening off somewhere else, so whilst they're momentous events, it almost feels like we're not really involved at all.

We booked in for another visit to the block on Sunday, and the vendor was kind enough to allow that, so we arranged with my FIL, Graham, to come along and check the place out.

It was an absolutely beautiful day, weather wise, and we started it off with a visit to the neighbours, who it just so happened were already known to Graham. This was another good start to the future, they were superb people, very easy to get along with and able to give us a great insight into the area.

After that we moved across to the block. It's still verdant even though the district has had precious little rain in the last month.

One of Graham's specialties is building dams, so we were very keen to hear any advice he had to offer on the matter, and there was a lot of good advice to be had. Due to the steepness of most of the block, and the fact that the house site is a good 50-100 metres (we don't have accurate topo maps yet, they should arrive tomorrow) above the lowest point of the property, we are faced with the challenge of collecting water and getting it to defy gravity in order to supply the house and gardens that will be around it with liquid sustenance.

A couple of spots I had selected as suitable were discarded due to requiring too much earth to be moved for the amount of capacity gained. A couple of other decent sites were discovered and some initial plans involving piston pumps to transfer water were sketched out. Once we've settled we'll be going back with the level to run it over and see what the best options will be.

We were keen to hear Graham's general opinion, as he's had a lot to do with farming and growing things, and whilst we've had some experience on the small scale, we've never made a decision quite as monumental as buying this land. I guess it would have been ideal to have him look over it before a final decision was made, but circumstances didn't permit. Still, the news was good at the other end anyway. Except for the challenge of getting the water up high everything else checked out. Lots of good timber, good soil and good climate, with pastures in a reasonable state. All in all an A+ as far as we're concerned.

We've started on some basic sketching of ideas for the place, though we're not going too in depth until we've had the time to do a better analysis of the land. We have also started to seriously consider how we are going to approach the building and power issues, with some pertinent questions asked and answered over at Aussies Living Simply.

Still more waiting game ahead of us, but we are now more assured of our purchase. Unless we have a fair disaster of some kind, we should be settling in a little under 6 months (and counting!) and then we will be free to roam at will...

More Than A Hint

I've been actively resisting getting too excited about the new land, until now! I can't believe that another month has slipped by in that time, but it was certainly well spent.

This morning we heard that our loan for the land has been approved, meaning we can get in and sign the contract sometime in the next few days (well, probably not over the weekend, but sometime)

We may still have up to six months to wait before settlement, given that we need to get a DA approved on the house and site we prefer, and the vendor needs to register a boundary change, but still, that's six months to success, rather than eternity to no result at all.

Now issues that were previously not of great concern can come to the forefront. How do we afford to get the power on to the site? At somewhere in the vicinity of 40k that will be a challenge.

Then, do we go the owner builder route, or fork out the extra cash to get someone else to do it in a reasonable amount of time? The big issue with that part of the plan is that finance for the building would require selling our current residence, which would mean making some sort of arrangement to live elsewhere in the meantime.

This is the tough question, and is tied in to the power issue. If we went with someone else building it we would potentially be able to roll the power costs up into the building loan, allowing it all to be done in good time. Otherwise we need to find the money for the power before any other work can begin out there, and then find time and money to do each step of the building. With the two mortgages we may be a bit too stretched to accomplish much.

As for living somewhere else whilst building went on, that would be very difficult for us to do. It would be hard to leave this place for a move to town, even for the few months it would take to build, though that is perhaps overly optimistic and we could be waiting a year, and there's still a lot of things we'd like to do here before we could feel like we were passing on something worthwhile to the next folks to take it up. On top of that we'd like to propagate all the fruit trees we've collected, so that will need to wait until next year at least.

I guess yet again we will leave the question for a while, and that mysterious force that seems to propel us forward on our path will come up with a solution, it has done so far on this roller-coaster ride, for which we are most grateful.

I would like to share another bit of "universal assistance" we've been gifted with. Due to the way the deal is structured we were looking at waiting up to a year before settlement could occur. This was causing me some concern, as when we get started we'd love to do it sooner rather than later. I'd resigned myself to waiting that year, and had left it.

The solicitor requested the inclusion of a clause in the contract to cover refinancing in the event the whole process did go longer than six months, as we could only get the finance held open for that long. After that we would need to apply for a new loan.

The vendor, upon hearing of this, was not impressed, thinking we were setting it up so we could bail out, rather than understanding that we would need to refinance as the loan offer would expire. Once he had this explained to him, he was off to his solicitor and organised that his 9 month boundary adjustment time was to be 3 months, resulting in a total time to settlement of 6 months. Just like that the year of waiting is halved, and happiness, of course, doubled!!

We've got the most exciting bit to go now. We can begin to plan where things will go, in a pseudo-permaculture fashion. We need to run the block as a money spinner in order to meet tax office requirements, so we will need to blend that requirement with our desire for a lifestyle as self-sufficient-ish as possible. It's a challenge to look forward to.

I've always enjoyed propagating trees, they have such a permanence about them that growing them from seed gives me much greater satisfaction than any other type of plant. Up to now I'd had to avoid growing too many as there just was not the room for them here. 6 Oak seedlings in the glasshouse are now the beginning of a new age of propagational joy, we should have enough room to fit in an entire forest now :)

Thanks!

Hints Of The Future

The last month or so has been jam packed with things to keep me occupied. Work has been super-hectic with a major project, which should be calming down at the end of the week as it enters stage 2. I should be able to gain some semblance of normality once the requirement to work until the ungodly hours of the morning is done away with.

Those two special days in the week that are called "weekend" have similarly been consumed with both work and driving to "Sydney" on a regular basis. My dad is moving, and his sheds have become the Steptoe & Son of my dreams. Almost everything he considered throwing out has been accepted, loaded and transported the 400 odd Km's back home.

In reviewing my haul I came to an interesting conclusion. Nearly everything I've idly wished for over the last few months has now come my way through this serendipity.

We have a bodgy standard rural pipe connecting the mains to the house, courtesy of the original inhabitants. In our clay soil, once summer hits the ground moves and the pipe bursts with regularity. So after the last bursting I left the hole open thinking I would get some green line poly and do the job properly. Life got in the way and I never made it to town to get the pipe. The DW's desire that I should fill in the hole won out, and it was done. A few weeks later I arrive at dad's, and lo and behold on offer is close to a full roll of green line poly. Will the miracles of wishes never cease? Indeed not!!

I'd also wished for an outdoor sink, received. A bathtub for the water chestnuts, received. A completely open flyscreen to replace the half closed one on the front door? Recevied. A bike to ride? Done times two. A 44 gallon drum to make a charcoal "factory"? Got one of those too.

When discussing this with my brother he mentioned the secret. I thought, the what? Then he clarified that I needed capitals in there. "The Secret". He's heard a bit about this, and thinks it's the same thing. Wish for things and the universe provides them. Takes me back to the days of youthful idealism reading Deepak Chopra and Louise Hay and wishing it were all so easy. Maybe there is something in it after all?

Now we've been considering moving for some time, idle thoughts, nothing concrete yet, though they have been less and less idle as time has gone by. My dear mother has been telling us to do it sooner rather than later, so we can get fruit trees up and running before the kids are too old to be interested in eating fruit etc etc. Golden advice all of it. So after a recent conversation with her I decided to speak to our mortgage advisor (now she hasn't asked for advertising, but we're chuffed with the help we received on this place, and the help to date on our new adventure, so it would be remiss of me to not name names, Kylie McFarlane at Aussie in Springwood) who helped us into this home, just to see what options were available to us, to see how we would go about moving our plans forward.

Well, you wouldn't believe it but there were options for us, and pretty good ones. The message was, find something you like and we'll go from there.

A short while later we turned up a nice block of land, over in a good area as far as our climate requirements went. We ummed and ahhh'd over it, trying to decide whether it was still too soon, but then thought, what they hey, the universe will let us know whether it's possible or not (or the bank managers at least).

So now, were just waiting to see if the finance will be approved. It hasn't been an easy one, there were a number of hidden issues with the place that caused us some concern, but we were able to find ways around them. It's a lovely block of land, 69 acres of it, with a bit of creek frontage, a lot of hillside, and some great stands of massive white box, which is an endangered species therefore protected.

I've decided not to get stressed about it, it either works out or it doesn't. Throwing it out to the universe, making the wish and trying to remain detached from the outcome. As I look back over the path that led us to this point in life, in this location, it seems just like a carefully organised holiday package, roller-coaster rides and all. If only I could remember what we ordered in the first place :-)

I read another example of this kind of universe in a post over at the blog by Lightening: Fast Tracking Our Dreams

So I've not gone totally loopy, yet...

New Trees

Our order of bare rooted trees for this winter arrived yesterday! They travelled all the way up from Tasmania, completing the journey safe and sound. They're currently sitting in a bucket of very weak seaweed tea, and will be planted out at lunchtime today, if there's time.

The order was only for three trees this year, well, four if you count the ornamental, but I don't. Two new apples, a Beauty of Bath and Cornish Aromatic, and a pear, Beurre Hardy (also known as a Gellert's Butterbine, a much more appealing name in my opinion).

Why am I buying more trees when we are planning on moving, and actually put them into the ground?? As a young fellow I was a collector, and I remain so today. Stamps, coins, toys, essentially anything of which there was more than one variety was a target for collection. I enjoyed collecting different varieties of herbs, though this interest has fallen a little by the wayside due to the difficulty of obtaining anything outside of the mainstream range.

Fruit tree varieties have become the collectible of choice as I've gotten older, and so another couple of trees could not be resisted. I'll probably end up getting a couple more trees from the local nurseries, a mulberry and a medlar at least, and no doubt anything else that takes my fancy.

I cannot help myself but to keep putting plants into this place. I've been this way all along, even when we were renting houses, I had to keep putting things into the ground. Above and beyond the desire to collect things, there is also the desire to leave each place changed by my time there. I shall no doubt be forgotten as readily as the people that lived, and gardened, here before me, but the changes I make will perhaps live on, in some modified form, well into the future.

Each garden created in a place is either an adaptation or recreation of what was there before. Sometimes the site is cleared and levelled, and started on a blank slate, sometimes what existed before is added to, built upon. In either case, the environment of the garden is in a state of flux whilst humans work it. The garden and gardener grow together for a time, then part ways. The new gardener is subtly (or perhaps not so) influenced by the work of the previous gardeners. The new gardener that takes on a place grows not only with the garden, but with all the previous gardeners who were there.

If I were to resist the urge to plant more trees, then I would be resisting the urge to be a bigger part of the future, even anonymously. Who knows, one day, beyond "peak everything", people in this village may be eating Cornish Aromatics for supper, all grown from a tree in some forgotten fellow's back yard.