Our Land in Chewton

Here are a few photos of the location of our new house.

Here are a few photos of the location of our new house. At the right is the view from the north. The house will have windows running down the north side to gain winter sunlight and the south side for the views. These photos date from when we first took over the property. There were many small eucalypts  that had sprouted from old stumps. These are not viable as trees because they are too fragile. We had the old stumps ground down and we have removed the growth which was a bushfire hazard.

The view from halfway up the hill. It is hard to remember a time when it was this green. This photo was taken at the end of the drought breaking winter. It is certainly drier and more crackly now.

This tree became victim to a flock of cockatoos. Our next door neighbours heard a commotion one day and saw them attacking the bark of this particular tree. There must have been something delicious under the bark. They almost ringbarked it in an hour, then flew away leaving all other trees intact. This tree is one of two we had to remove to build our house in the envelop stipulated in our planning documents. It had suffered badly from the ringbarking, so it was far from the healthiest tree on the property.

Maybe this is one of the culprits!

Sticky Everlasting Daisies

Australian Mistletoe

Digger's Speedwell

So why are we doing this?

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.