Our Grand Design: The highs and lows of building in a boom
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About this ebook
Join us on our journey as we build our ideal home (a) to our own design (b) on a limited budget (c) in the middle of a boom. With hindsight, any one of these steps would have presented a challenge; taken together, it turned out to be something more than that.
But we were blithely unaware of this when we set out to create our ideal home. It was partly our own fault that our original modest and sensible sketches fledged into something quite different, but partly beyond our control when we were overtaken by the building boom. And it was this last that caused the difficulties to snowball and the stresses to accumulate. In the end, what we had estimated would take around six months to build took five years.
Would we do it again? Probably. The house is a joy. But if we had any choice at all, we’d do it in a less ferocious housing market at a time when land was cheaper and when builders and tradesmen were not bending under the multiple pressures of unrelenting work, a crippling scarcity of building materials and escalating prices.
Tangea Tansley
Tangea Tansley was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in East Africa. She has first-class honours in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia and a doctorate in cross-cultural literature from Murdoch University. Currently based in Perth she is the author of several books including the newly-released psychological novel Out of Place, the Australian historical novel A Break in the Chain, the house-build memoir Our Grand Design, the self-help guide For Women Who Grieve and co-writer of the biography Heytesbury Stud. Her short stories, essays, articles and reviews have been published, broadcast and anthologised in Africa, Asia and Australia. She is joint-winner of the 2013 Todhunter Literary Award; her novels and short stories have been long-listed, shortlisted, highly commended in national awards.
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