Moving from the city to the country is a one shot deal for us. We need to move in to our dream home on our dream bit of land and be happy for the rest of our lives. Piece of cake. Not. We have been looking for land and have found what we consider to be the perfect land! Trouble is, it already has a cottage on it which is totally unsuitable for our family. Because the land has a cottage and infrastructure (water tanks, septic, shedding, solar power and batteries) it costs a bit too much to fit within our budget. Virtually all the land that has houses on, the houses aren’t suitable for one reason or another and, in any case, they won’t have our dream home so that’s another $200k we have to find.

If there’s a  decent enough house on-site already, it may be possible to rent this out and build our new home on another part of the property as this would give us an income stream

We can find plenty of pieces of land that would be suit our needs but an empty field needs a dam, water, septic, power, shedding and a house – and lots more before you can call it home. A daunting prospect and you need a stout heart to take on the challenge.

We have been doing loads of research into the sort of house that we would like to live in. There are a few choices and we’ll deal with them one at a time.

• Existing house on land.
• Have a house built for us.
• Move an existing old house to the land and restump.
• Build a kit home
• Build an ekokit
• Have a house built off-site and then installed
• Have a container house built off-site and then installed.