Where to Live?

We decided that we wanted to live in the countryside up in the hills with a bit of land around us, preferably on a block of 1,000 - 2,000 sq m. This area called the Adelaide Hills is a range running roughly north/south to the east of the city of Adelaide.

It's a beautiful area covered in conservation parks and native bushland dotted with quaint villages and vineyards. The only downside is that it's cooler up there and has more rain than on the plains, and temperatures can drop to freezing point in the Winter.

Finding just the right block of land became a long drawn out process of reviewing adverts on the web and then driving all over the countryside to view them.

As we didn't want to live on a new estate (done that before) finding odd blocks of land that people were selling off privately was difficult, and we weren't the only ones looking!

After viewing all the land within our budget that were either full of trees (too expensive to remove), surrounded by trees (damp and dark), backing onto railway lines (for freight trains), next to main roads, ex-quarries, too steep or too close to neighbours we had to rethink our requirements.

We decided that we had no choice but to look at the new estates further out in Littlehampton and Mount Barker. The block sizes on offer are on average between 500-800 sq m with only the odd block being between 1,000-1,600. In Europe the smaller land sizes would be fine but here in Australia detached homes can be built right up to the fence line, which leaves you feeling hemmed in and very close to your neighbours.

We looked at the larger blocks and they all had problems that meant that the builder couldn't make them smaller in order to sell them e.g trees in the middle of the block that had to stay, backing onto industrial estates with sound barriers in between or next to a main road. We just couldn't see ourselves living there.

The only option left to us was to see if there were any empty blocks being re-sold in the established estates in Mount Barker. One area in particular had what they call rural blocks of between 2,000 and 4,000 sq m.

We viewed 7 blocks, 2 backed on to the freeway, 1 was shaded by trees, and 2 had road noise reflected off a hill. That left 2 that we liked and they both had great views. The one that we liked the most we thought was too expensive, so we sent the details of the other to a builder for advice as to whether we could afford to build on it.

The builder said that because of the steepness of the block it would in fact be cheaper to build on the block that we thought too expensive. So here you can see our dilemma, buy the expensive land with the great views, in a great location or start looking again.

After 48 hours of further research we decided to buy the land.