Dirt, dirt and more dirt....

So when does dirt become land and when does land become a block... or are they all the same? It appears that our block or land or dirt depending on how you look at it is taking more work than I first thought to get it "construction ready".

When we first saw the block it looked like this:

As you can see it's generally free from debris...

Only a few weeks later it looked like this:

and this...

and this...

It appears that the company building all the houses around us decided to use our "dirt" to dump their rubble. This makes for a very unhappy Maranda - several phone calls to the builder in question had the situation unresolved.

So fast forward a few weeks later and we come to last weekend where the troops i.e Chris, Chris' brother Jon, Chris' brother-in-law Steve and Chris' Dad decide to rid our block of said rubble. The day turned into a comedy of errors - the Kanga's hydrolic pin broke & then a tyre got a puncture from a nail & had to be returned, the dingo's chain came off and several trips to Bunning's for tools saw the chain fixed. Chris ran out of whipper snipper cord and Steve broke his new whipper snipper and then to top the day off Chris' dad accidently hit a car with the 2-tonne truck. But here's the kicker... they only managed to get half the rubble removed so there is still more work to be done before Plantation come out to cut the block just after the 30th March.

I hope this is not a sign of things to come...

To plan or not to plan...

that is the question... well actually we do have plans and we are pretty chuffed with them if I do say so myself! Check them out for yourselves!

And here are our elevations:

Give me a home...

amongst the gum trees... actually any trees would be nice! So herein starts the process of building our dream home. For the uninitiated, or those that chose to tune out everytime we've spoken about it, Chris and I are in the process of building Plantation Homes "Empire" design home. For those familiar with Plantation designs we are building the very original floor plan. Anyway our contract is due to be moved into "production" stage on the 30th April 2009 - we are just impatiently waiting for our mortgage documents to arrive!

Our block of land is at Narangba which is on the north side of brisbane. It's a 953m2 battle-axe block - here's our contour survey. It's the last block in the street and we were lucky to get it for a steal at $185,000. The fencing was already there from the houses around us which is great! The only down side to the block is the rail line which is after the street behind us. Fortunately they have built a 2.6m acoustic fence and in addition to the laminated windows we are installing we should be sound proof!