Once Upon a Time…

Once upon a time we had this grand idea. We’ve had a lot of grand ideas but this time we actually acted on it. The idea was to buy some land. We didn’t know where. But we knew we wanted to do this (after months of torturing ourselves if this was the right thing to do).

During the Christmas of 2007 we went to Great Barrier Island and fell in love with the nature, the remoteness, the birds and the bush. We dreamt of buying a place there and looked around but really couldn’t find much. The more we looked the more the 5 hour commute by ferry started to weigh on us. Great Barrier is not very accessible even though its beautiful so we dropped the idea and moved onto other locations.

On a trip to the Coromandel with friends we discovered (or rediscovered) Coromandel Town at the top of the Coromandel peninsula and Tuateawa on the east coast. Tuateawa was very similar to Great Barrier and you could actually see Great Barrier from there. We looked for land there but unfortunately we only found tiny lifestyle blocks with gorgeous sea views. Tiny meant living in a suburb on the Coromandel which is exactly what we didn’t want to do.

We continued our search and found two pieces of land. One in Colville and another near Coromandel Town at the top of the 309 Road in a place called Mahakirau Estate. Both extremely different from each other. Colville was literally on the water at least half of the day. Mahakirau was an enormous piece of bush (forest) in the hills overlooking mountains.

To make a long story short, we finally decided on Mahakirau Estate.

Our idea with this blog is to share the great adventure of buying land and building our own dream house with passion…and a whole lot of recycled materials.