Reflections

Now that the subdivision has been approved and we're closer to starting to rebuild, I've been feeling very melancholy about our little home as demolition gets closer.

This little home is very special as it's the first one I've owned on my own. The first one I could hang my photos and paintings up in without having to ask anyone else permission. The first one I could plant the plants I wanted to plant, where I wanted to plant them.

It was a really lovely little home, beautifully renovated and full of character. I'm having a hard time accepting it will be knocked down.

The fact of the matter is though, completely renovating an existing home, particularly a post war one, is more expensive per square metre than knocking down and rebuilding. That's also not taking into account the cost of raising the home to be out of the flood zone, which would be another $30K. Resale value wouldn't be maximised if you didn't raise and because it's such a large block of land, not subdividing would be missing an opportunity.

But it's still hard. I came across some of the pics from the marketing campaign from when I bought it. You can see how pretty it was.

Sadly, this is what it looks like currently. It's hard to imagine it full of water, but it was.