Nature does not rush.

Hi there,

Welcome to the B&L blog. 

For those of you familiar with the Beck and Lola brand, this new venture will be a little different, more of a detour off the path and a look into our latest project, building a home on a one acre country block. Here we'll document the build, our experiences and lessons learned, DIY projects and all sorts of other adventures along the way, combined with the usual B&L lettering/creative twist. We really hope you enjoy coming along on the ride with us.

So, a bit more about us and this latest "project" or "huge life decision we are sinking all of our savings into". My name is Kate (you may have seen my mug or chatted with me on the Beck & Lola Instagram) and my partner in crime is Trav. One day, after driving Trav insane, constantly showing him what I had found on realestate.com.au, I managed to drag him out to the country side to see a beautifully big one acre block we could build our dream house on and live happily ever after. 

I was extremely excited and we stood right in the middle of this block of land and looked at each other and said....'Well, this isn't very good'. It was too close to the main road and as a logging truck drove past I struggled to hear myself think. Deflated, we walked back to the car and just as we we're about to hop in and drive home, we looked across the road and saw a 'For Sale' sign. We thought, 'As long as we're here, we might as well take a look'. At first, it looked like it was just an old farm paddock that was completely overgrown and been abandoned for years. But we stepped in, and walked down this beautifully long driveway, the grass was green and lush, the sun was shining and we both looked at each other and said...."This is the one". Even thinking about it now, I get that butterflies in your stomach feeling. We were home.

The next day I got on the phone to the real estate agent, eager to figure out what the hell we had to do next to make it ours only to be told the property was already under contract. Tears ensured (from me), we were devastated. But in my mostly super organised style, I decided we would get our finances in order and have a pre-approval ready and keep looking for that perfect property, I was sure it was out there. And what a process that was, I have a headache just thinking about it. It felt like even the simple things felt difficult, like my signature, that didn't match the one on my licence or my passport or the bank and I had re-signed my contract so many times it looked like I'd gotten signatures off a football team of people who had the same name. Or when I didn't realise for some reason we needed to transfer settlement money into the home loan account and needed to withdraw a ridiculously unsafe amount of cash from two different bank branches (the second of which assumed we we're frauds) and carry it through a questionable shopping centre nicknamed "knife point" to deposit it at our home loan bank to ensure we didn't delay settlement. 

That last part gives you a clue as to what happened next. The same week our finance approval came through, the perfect magical block of land came back on the market! As if it was meant to be. We immediately locked that baby in and, as of October last year, we were able to call it our Home. 

Bringing us to part two: Trying to build our dream home on a super slim budget. 

To make this all work we have decided to build a 60m2 steel kit home as owner builders and do as much as we can ourselves. In our minds we thought this would be a breeze and it would work perfectly in our budget. Wrong! So very wrong, and so very naive of us. Lesson one (kind of, lesson one was mostly the struggles of organising finance, but finance is boring and we have repressed the memory of that time deep down inside) - Everything costs more and takes longer than you think it will. 

Which is why this post is called "Nature does not rush...and yet everything is accomplished". We were getting very frustrated and feeling very defeated, things weren't going by the schedule we had imagined and it felt like we would never make any progress. But recently we've had some small wins and have come to realise that we need to stop, take a deep breath and remember to enjoy the process. This is what this blog is for, to document our adventure, our lessons learnt and to take a step back and look at what we have achieved so far, remembering we will get there in the end.

Stay posted for more.
xx