3.5 acres, 2 kids and a Sledgehammer: Living the Dream

It's hard to put into words what our little piece of country side means to us. It is a place we try to get to most weekends, we have no running water, no toilet and only recently acquired a generator so power is limited, but going there fills us with the kind of bliss I didn't know we were missing.

'We' are my husband Aidan, animator and the general handyman on site, Oscar, our 3 year old son who likes to 'use' the tools and help Dad build things, and William, 20 months and is still a bit hit and miss about whether or not he's an outdoors man and can appreciate our permanent camping site.

We have a 3.5acre property in Mia Mia (pronounced My My by the locals) which currently contains a shipping container and a cubby house. The last few months have seen the creation of a patio area which is really just boxed in crushed granite, and 5 poles with beams across them which will become a roof on the container, 2 stone wall garden beds that Aidan likens to a pet cemetery and as of yesterday 3 fruit trees.

We bought the property in 2007. Between the time we put an offer in on the land, and the offer being accepted we discovered Oscar was on the way, hence the several year delay in being able to do anything with it, and then of course the arrival of William. The previous owners had done some sort of excavation, so we have 3 piles of huge rocks and a driveway cleared. Rocks are a very relevant part of life at Mia Mia. They are absolutely everywhere. We took a sample to Aidan's Uncle Stephen (Gallagher) who is a geologist, who informed us that approximately 100 thousand years ago a volcano exploded and spewed across our property, leaving volcanic rock everywhere. Unfortunately it isn't the fertile kind that has broken down, it's only young volcanic rock and won't be useful in our lifetime.

The big picture dream is to create our dream home. We don't necessary plan on living there full time, but it will be our retreat, complete with offices so we can both work, and plenty of scope for play and entertaining. The architect working on it is very conveniently my brother David (Lister), though when someone is designing a house for free, you fall on the back burner when real work gets busy. We plan on building a house out of shipping containers, based on the idea of creating a home with as many recycled materials as we can, living as sustainably as possible and having a cutting edge, evolving work of art as our home.

Mia Mia is a place for the boys to learn about building things, and making a fire and how to entertain themselves without a tv. They love going there, most probably because it is the one place we get to spend time as a family without work and other distractions readily available in our Melbourne flat. We are all learning new skills out there. We don't have Aidan's dad nearby, who would normally help us construct and fix things. My mum lives in Bendigo, half an hour away so if we get rained out we sometimes go there for breakfast, but we're meeting neighbors and everyone seems to be very supportive of a young family moving into the area.

We have two neighbors in our little street, Mary and her husband, and Terry. After 5 loads of dirt and road base being delivered in two weekends I think we'd proved we're sticking around so Mary has started bringing us the local paper, the Bridge Connection when it comes out each month, and Terry pops by and offers his help. The night we'd been shoveling 7 cubic meters of crushed granite we were sitting around our fire in the dark when he bought over a gas lantern. It completely changed our evenings out there. I can't believe we've been sitting in the dark for so long! We went out and bought one the following week.

I'll try and update this each time we go out, so we can look back at the end and see how far we've come. Wish us luck!