The process has commenced!

Yes, after 12 months of working on the house/garage/stable plans, wading through the mountain of BASIX criteria and changing our minds half a dozen times on the building location, today we finally took in half a tree in paperwork and lodged our development application with the council! They tell us it will only take 10 weeks to approve our plans, but after our experience with the machinery shed, we're expecting about 20 weeks!

It doesn't seem like six months have passed since we packed up the horses, dogs and furniture and moved out of our lovely brick home and into the caravan. Life has been very simple and very uncomplicated since then with no electricity and no running water. We decided to place the caravan in the middle of a lovely grove of native trees which, at the time, seemed like a great idea seeing as how the days were between 30-40 degrees. Now that it's winter, it doesn't seem like such a good idea, although we are a bit protected from the strong frosts that leave the cars iced over. The nights are down to -5 degrees with the days around the roaring 13 degree temperatures.

We applied for electricity in the week before Christmas and on 18 May 2006 the transformer was finally attached to the pole on our boundary. Even though we do have a generator which we mainly use to watch tele (yes, we just couldn't stand not watching the new seasons of McLeod's Daughters, Lost, Big Brother or Amazing Race), it's just not the same as reaching out and turning on a powerpoint for instant power. After the first cold snap in May, we decided to search our storage shed for our small blower heater and miraculously found it. We only have it going when while we're watching tele but at least it's better than wearing the three layers of clothes, beanie, scarf and gloves to bed that we were! What we now have to do is dig a trench from the pole to the house site (about 250 metres) and then from the house site to the shed site (about 150 metres). Then the electrician will come out, lay the cables and connect us up. We sure won't know ourselves with full time power!

We lodged our development application for the machinery shed (which will be our home until the main house is built) in January and nine weeks later we received approval from the council. On 23 May 2006, the excavations commenced. We now have a level site for the shed, a driveway, a 60m x 50m riding arena and a whopping dam. After the rain last week, we now have about five feet of water in the dam, which we actually didn't want as the dam's not quite finished - but who are we to complain about getting rain!!