Even more SNOW!!!

Last week we had a bit of a cold blast and some frosty mornings.  Everyone was saying to us "oh that's normal, we usually get one last blast of winter before spring really kicks in".  Apparently it wasn't enough of a blast because this morning we woke to the largest snowfall we've had.
All of the mountains around us were snap frozen on top, it looked exceptionally cool.  There was a defined line of white trees and a lot of mist hanging around.
It was when you got up to the top of mountain range though that the winter wonderland really kicked in.  There were kids on the side of the road building snowmen, and the "slippery when frosty" sign was covered in snow.  Derek came up after I went to work and took some photos, my favourite was the dam

How gorgeous is that! Put me in a great mood for my day at work.

 Derek also went to the land to see how much snow we got. The frogpond is very, very full and a little icy, but the picture below is looking up to the back of the block.

I'm sure that we'll get to the point that this stuff is not exciting, although I don't want that to ever happen.  But until then, expect photos of snow (probably no more for this year) when it's this impressive.

Laying out the house

Last weekend we took a massive step in the process of building our dream home in Tasmania.  We had the block resurveyed on Friday and on Saturday we went out onto the land with our designer, Nigel Jones, and  marked out the house on the block.

It was really strange to stand there and have a first conceptual image of how the house will sit on the land.  We were going to scan in the floorplan and put it with the post, but as we were working things out we made a few minor changes, so we decided to wait.

This week we will be having a soil classification done on the block, and from there it should only take about a fortnight to get the development application into Council.  They have about 6 weeks to give it the thumbs up and then it's a building surveyor and then submitting a planning application. Once the development application is approved though we can start preparing the site (excavation) for the build and Derek and start trying to cost the project (the really scary bit).

Nigel has given us a building figure which is above what we had hoped it would come in at, but we need to qualify some of this.  The big thing is that if we owner build then it should be cheaper, although Derek is a little freaked out about it all at the moment :-)

So we'll get the floorplan up as soon as we have an amended copy, but barring any unforeseen changes in the plans it is very likely we will be starting the build before the end of the year at this stage.