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After a couple of months of house hunting, Paul and I decided to start looking for a piece of land buy and build a house on instead. Paul has been working away in Dargaville recently so I've been spending a lot of time looking at pieces of land on Trade Me. I came across three blocks of land on Miro Road. There were two 4000 sq/m sections and a 1.3 hectare block of land. Dad, Paul and I went for a drive and walked over the 4000 sq/m block. At the time I thought it was the three acres, but it turned out that I'd got it mixed up. The land had four different real estate signs on it, but I chose to contact Kelly from Ray White. I emailed her via Trade Me asking to view the 1.3 hectare block. This was on Wednesday 2nd July. She was quick to get back to me and said she was happy to meet us on Sunday.
We'd been watching the Netherlands v Costa Rica that Sunday morning. The game went into extra time and then to a penalty shoot-out, which the Netherlands won. We were cutting it fine so we drove out to the property with our orange t-shirts still on. Dad also met us there. We found Kelly really friendly and down to earth. She pointed out the boundaries and then walked over the property with us. I fell inlove with the property straight away. I loved the native trees that were dotted over the rolling land and the spring fed creek that ran the length of the bottom boundary. It was perfect for us.
After talking with Paul and our family we agreed that we would put an offer in on the land. I emailed Kelly the next day and organised to meet with her Tuesday after work to put an offer on paper. The asking price was $150,000 so we decided to put in an offer of $145,000. Kelly went up to see Frank at Jane Mander straight after meeting with us. It wasn't long after that, that I received a phone call saying that he had accepted our offer. I think initially I was in shock. I had expected him to come back with a counter offer, but he hadn't. Kelly told me that he'd said that he wasn't going to go back and forth over $5000 and that everyone needs a start in life. I was so happy, but it still all seemed quite surrel.
We still had to go back to the bank and tick the last couple of boxes. Because we want to self-manage our own project, the bank wanted a timeline as well as quotes for everything from building materials, to carpet and curtains. We had three weeks to organise this before the land went unconditional.
I rang Dad first to let him know that Frank had approved our offer, then called Mum, Nana and Poppa. It was just after 9.00 pm by this time, but I was on holiday so we decided to stay for one beer with Hans and Ilonka. We know it's going to be a lot of hard work, but hopefully it will pay off in the end. It's definitely the beginning of a new adventure for us.
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