We live exceptionally busy lives and constantly find ourselves trying to strike a balance between work, family, leisure, and our own home renovation. It’s a delicate balancing act but I guess, that comes with wanting it all.

We have a lot riding on this renovation. This is to be our forever home. It’s a big task and a big financial commitment but we’ve being putting steps into place for many years leading up to this project and this home and the work that will go into it, is our answer to, one day, kicking our ultimate goal of financial freedom.

At the end of the day, we want to give our kids a childhood full of blissful memories and a future full of opportunity and our house is part of the journey.

This video is brought to you by AMP. If you want to own your own home sooner and be debt free, AMP can help. Click here. to find out how.

Carlene xx

In my last post, I gave a very, very condensed account of our history in home buying and renovating (you can read it here) so it’s only right that I give you the low down on our future home plans.

Our footings are being poured as I write this so it’s official, stuff is happening. Don’t get me wrong, the amount of work we still need to do on our home is HUGE. You see, our house footprint is BIG, too big, which means that everything that comes along with this project is up-scaled – the budget, our time, our effort and on it goes, but everyday we are a step closer to the goal and I think I can almost see a very faint glimmer of light through the fog that is the dirt, rubble and dust that is our renovation.

Right now we are in the very initial stages of sourcing our building materials, looking at colours, and sifting through fixtures and finishes, with as little damage to our bank account as possible but whilst also delivering a home that we are proud of. This is our forever home, after all and given that renovation and design is our livelihood, there are certain areas of the build that we are simply not willing to compromise on so right now it’s about striking a balance and investing and saving where it counts.

I said to Michael from the get go, that if we build on the current slab, which was undamaged by the fire (see previous post) then the house will be WAY too big for a family of 4 and long term, it would be a money sucker; it would be costly to furnish, costly to power, and cleaning and maintenance would suck up precious time and resources.  We therefore made it our goal to work out a way to reduce the internal footprint of the house, which so far has meant excavating A LOT of concrete. And when I say A LOT, our excavating and earth moving costs are 3 times the cost we had accounted for and we’re not even out of the ground yet. While this isn’t ideal, we are essentially spending now to save later and that’s sort of what this reno is all about, working towards our future. Slogging away at the reno ourselves and sacrificing overseas holidays will eventually pay us back, as all going to plan, the home will be worth much more in dollars than we put into it, and will ultimately provide us with options. If we want to (and we will), we will be able to use the equity in the home to buy, renovate and sell again and again and again.

So, this home will certainly be our kick start but it will also eventually be our nest egg when in many, many years to come when the kids grow up and move on, and when we retire, we will be able to do so comfortably and while this seems too far off to think about in detail, I suppose, retiring comfortably and free of financial constraints, is really part of the end goal.

This post is brought to you by AMP. If you want to explore your goals, AMP can help.

Carlene xx

There was never any doubt in mine and Michael’s mind that would be home owners, and sooner rather than later. It was always just a given. Both our parents owned their homes at a young age, which we recognise was easier to do with home prices back then. Nonetheless, owning a place to call our own and in which to start a family was always one of our goals moving into adulthood and working towards financial freedom.

We purchased our first home at the ages of 21 and for over 6 years, we chipped away, slowly renovating our modest 3 bed, 2 bath house on the Northern end of the Gold Coast. It wasn’t easy, with Michael only in the beginnings of his carpentry apprenticeship and my interest in interior design undeveloped.

Our first home and first reno (on a tight budget).

It also wasn’t easy financially, with Michael on an apprenticeship wage and later, me on maternity leave and then returning to work only part time. We lived simply and watched our pennies. I remember I would never spend more than $35 on a piece of clothing; we would only eat out once a week (and it was usually sushi); and every holiday was a camping one (actually, the camping holidays still remain),

Post reno. It’s pretty ‘meh’ looking back on it but it’s not bad for a first reno on a tight budget and it did the trick because we sold before auction.

When we found our much larger, much more ambitious, forever home/half a home at the other end of the coast, we submitted a very unattractive offer, which was subject to the sale of our then house, building and pest inspections and, a bid $100k under the asking price. It was fair. The property was in a bad, bad way. It had suffered a devastating fire and the owner had simply walked away. It was a mess, a big mess – three levels of mess and it had been on the market for a year with no offers, so our odds were good.

The new block with a HUGE pool in the concrete slab, undamaged by the fire.

The second level. The brickwork also remained intact.

While everyone thought we were mad, the deal went through and the home was ours, along with many, many years of hard work and a big financial commitment. You see, the work that this home needed, and still needs, is immense and when we purchased it we knew this was a long term project (we didn’t have our blinkers on). Properties of this scale are money suckers and we would have to be very hands on but we also had two very young children whom needed our time so yes it would be a long, long process.

Framing on not even half of the concrete slab.

Fast forward a few years to 2014 and we were accepted on The Block. We saw this as our chance to win a lump sum that would be our answer to finishing our renovation. Well, as Australia witnessed, that wasn’t to be and winning only 10k between us for 5 months of filming and publicity commitments set us back financially. We had to start again and our renovation would have to wait.

The Block auction.

On the upside, the disappointment of the show outcome propelled us into action. We launched Cedar & Suede, a design and build business, blog and now also, digital video content production business. For the past couple of years, the business has been keeping us very busy, too busy to even look at our very unfinished house but we have decided that this is it; this is the time to bite the bullet and start/restart/finish our house. It has to happen to achieve our goal of financial security and our state of mind. Why and how? Stay tuned for the next post.

Michael and I at work, doing what we love.

This post is brought to you by AMP. If you want to own your own home sooner and be debt free, AMP can help find out how here. 

Carlene xx