The challenges of a narrow block

36.6 metres long, 9.59 metres wide, 351 metres square. Not a huge block of land by any means, but definitely not a small block either, but try finding a house that will fit on a block of land not quite 10 metres (~35 feet) wide.

I have been capturing my day to day experiences with this challenge on a nifty little program called DatePad (http://home.wanadoo.nl/ajberg/datepad.html) and it occurred to me that basically I was writing an offline blog, so I transferred things to here and I plan to use this now to track the (hopefully) daily progress of our new house as it is built, from a dirt block to a gleaming new monument to suburban living (again, hopefully!).

I am a software engineer by trade, optimistic cynical geek by nature (work that one out!) and hopefully (there's that word again!) by October 2006, a house owner.

The situation so far:

1. The land was purchased in April 2005, we ummed and arrred about it for a little while because it was a very narrow block of land, far narrower then the housing and building companies have standard plans for.
2. We ended up purchasing the land in April 2005 and started the process of looking for a builder that would accommodate the narrow block
3. We ended up with 3 builders, Impressions, Ventura, and Scott Park. Impressions, for some reason seemed to think we were not worth the effort, since about 2 weeks later we started talking to them they stopped talking to us, no emails, no return of phone calls, nothing... Not Happy! So they went of our list very quickly. Ventura was happy to design us a house to fit on our block for free, Scott Park charged as $500 for a design, but in the end the sheer effort the Ventura went to, daily emails, phone calls, nothing to much trouble, meant that they were our final pick
4. In mid November of '05 we signed the final contract for the house
5. And now tomorrow (3rd of Feb '06) the earth works start on our block! Wheee.

The house is everything we wanted, 4 bedrooms (1 becoming the computer room), two bathrooms, both with baths (a immovable set in stone requirement from the significant other), a lounge room, and a open space family, meals and kitchen, smart wiring thru out (yes!) and a host of other things. Plus a front and back yard and a lock up garage.

Can't wait! Hopefully (again!) by this time tomorrow there will be a hive of activity on the site (there had better be!).