Writing about this topic has got Monte and I talking about how we would do things differently. Some days we don’t think that we would change very much; other days we talk of changing many things! Thank you, Andrew, for inspiring me to discuss this topic!

Most recently, MG and I talked about how we would build sheds first, if we were ever again to embark on such an adventure. We have recently built two sheds and a chook house on the west side of our house. It would not have been difficult to build them earlier on. We should have had the slab made for the sheds at the same time as the house slab. We should also possibly have made our land cut a bit bigger, in order to accommodate bigger sheds.

Not having sheds made our building process a bit more awkward. Storing the straw bales, for example, was done in friends’ sheds (thank you, Ady, for your help, and Wally and Simon, for your sheds!). Monte’s tools and so forth were stored all over the place. We had a bus once, down by the cabin, which served as a shed, but having a shed at the house site is something that we really should have done much earlier. And we feel silly for not doing it earlier.

In a related topic, our property came with an unassembled American barn, plans and a council permit. We still haven’t built that, although we plan to, one day. We will put it down the hill, by the cabin. In hindsight, we should have built that in the first year, when our plans were being drawn up and we were getting building permits and so forth.

So many of our decisions have been based on finances. When we moved here, our original goal was to build our home without aquiring a loan. Part of our goal has been to be mortgage free. Therefore, we made a few sacrifices early on. Now we are kicking ourselves gently, as we realize some of the things we could have achieved.

The worst advice we were ever given was: “never go without something just because of money.” Sure enough, we ignored this snippet of craziness. However, sheds like ours are not overly expensive, and we should have built them earlier.

Matthew was so little when we moved here, and he was such a great helper during the build. You can imagine that the process was a little boy’s dream! Here he is, helping us mark our our house site. That was such an exciting time for us! Sometimes I look at part of the house and reminisce about an aspect of the build. I like the feeling that so much of our hands and heads went into our home.