The beginning of a dream or the end of a marriage?

After twenty long years of paying a mortgage we finally paid off our house and were debt free. So what better way to celebrate than to upgrade. Mad I know but now is the right time if we are every going to do it.

We started looking at renovating our current property and add a second level as we love our location but wanted a few extra larger rooms etc. After receiving four quotes we were astounded by the costs to renovate. We then went down the part of moving but staying in the same area. This was not looking good as the real estate market was going through the roof and we would still need to spend quite a large sum of money to update any of the places we looked at.

This lead us to building from scratch. Something I have always wanted to do since my early days as an architectural draftsperson. My wife took a little bit of convincing but after spending many sleepless nights crunching the number we were going to be far better off financially buying a block of land and building our dream home than renovating or moving.

Our current house is on a battle-axe block which we love but it is not the perfect block for a knock-down-rebuild. So the task of searching for a new block started.

After a few moths we were able to secure a block only 1km from where we currently live and it too is a battle-axe block which we are very happy about. It has a northerly aspect which will give us plenty of sun all year round.

So this leads me to the title of this post " the beginning of a dream or the end of a marriage?" Which will it be? Hopefully the dream as I am lucky in that my wife and I have the same taste and always are able to find a solution that we both like.

So now the fun begins!