Building a house takes some time

Hi there!
Another long overdue, but hopefully highly anticipated update from the land of the long white cloud.

What have we been up to you might ask....well . . . as most of you already know by now, we have bought a piece of land in the hopes to built our own house on it one day. Slowly, that dream is becoming reality. After the summer holiday (end of January) we started talking to 5 building companies about our plans. We roughly sketched what we had in mind a made a long list of wishes to be included. As the economy also slows down here in New Zealand as everywhere else at the moment, those companies are rather keen and tried hard to win us as a client. This was good news for us as it gave us some room for negotiations. After many meetings and several drafts we finally could choose one. We have signed a contract with a builder called Orange Homes.
For the Dutch: yep, huis van Oranje :-)

At the moment we have two horses called Sandy and Shirley on our land (owned by a colleague of George). They are doing a really good job keeping the grass down....and fertilizing it at the same time..there is horse shit all over the place. The picture was taken in February. As you can see the grass is quite brown. Now, after some rain it is all green again (see first picture).

We are still amazed. Besides owning a piece of New Zealand, we will also have our very own house here, hopefully finished before Christmas 2009!
But before the whole building process can start, there are some minor hurdles to take. Well, that is what you get when building rurally! Because of the proposed central position of the house on the land, we will need to extend the power, telephone and water from the their positions near the roadside. Also, we need to have a gravel driveway put in going from the roadside to the house. If we don't do that there is an increased risk that some (concrete) trucks might get stuck in the mud. Of course, there is not one company that can do all of those jobs themselves, so we need to find (affordable) contractors for all the different type of jobs. So we do a lot of calling and emailing to get some quotes and compare their prices. When we get all of those quotes together we need to go to the bank and ask for a mortgage that will pay all of those bills and at the same time will present us with affordable mortgage repayments. To give you a rough idea of what the house will look like and its proposed position on the plot, we have uploaded some scans of the sketches!
We should receive some detailed drawings from our building company in the next couple of days.
Look out for an update on the build soon.

Esther had a Golf Day from work. As only in New Zealand, that means playing golf for a whole day and being catered with sandwiches, beer and wine...on the golf course while playing. Obviously, it was an awesome day!



Easter weekend just finished. Although it is autumn, we had great weather with lots of sun. We went for a 3-hour walk in the Port Hills yesterday and today we walked on Sumner Beach. Not too bad.
No Easter Bunnies yet, if there are some Lindt ones left, we will buy them this week for half price...can't wait to knock their head off!

Cheers
Esther and George