So
why are we doing this? Giving up our comfortable cottage in inner city
Melbourne, kissing goodbye to the rich cultural life, the cafe culture, and our
friends?
My
husband Jamie and I decided that we needed a challenge. It would be so easy to
live out our days in Melbourne; sometimes travelling overseas and interstate,
pursuing our interests, participating in our community circle, volunteering ...
but we decided we needed to do things differently.
We
are interested in simple, sustainable living. We have done what we can to our
current home to lower its environmental footprint, but there is only so much
one can retrofit. We like to grow our own vegetables and preserve fruit for the
winter. Our tiny house has very limited space and we have to do all of our preserving
in our courtyard. It can get pretty ugly when we are trying to strain fifty
litres of passata! We also have a small community garden allotment where we
grow some vegetables in season, but as it is only twelve square metres, we
constantly have to compromise on what we wish to plant. We want more space, but
we want to use it to achieve a more sustainable and simple life. It sounds
counter intuitive, but we think it will work.
We love to be in the Australian bush, we love bird
watching, we are interested in Landcare projects and so it seems to make sense
to us that we would look to the country as our new home. Jamie grew up in a
tiny village called Chewton,
near Castlemaine in central Victoria, Australia. He has always been drawn to
the dry box ironbark bush that surrounds the town, and spent his childhood
roaming through the remnants of the goldrush of the 1850s. In contrast, I am a
city girl who has never lived over the “latte line”! It will be a massive lifestyle
change for me, but I am looking forward to the challenge.
We made the decision to
buy a pretty block of land on a hillside in Chewton, and after an exhaustive
(and exhausting) planning process and design phase, we are ready to begin our
project. We chose Sunpower Design in Melbourne as our designers because they
are specialists in sustainable building. They have been wonderful to work with
and have taken our simple plans and made them workable. I hope they will not be
offended at the title of this blog; they have produced many award winning
houses that incorporate cutting edge design within a sustainable framework. It
was our desire to build a very modest, ultra modern, minimalist house with just
enough space.