Our Property Story: Taking the blog back to when it first began

Caleb and I have always had a different story to most when it comes to owning a family home. The concept of buying a house that caters for all our needs in an area to settle down is a normal aspiration for most house hunters but not yet been a priority for us. While most have a personalised and detailed wish list of what they are looking for in a house, our focus is on just one - a good buy. I had no idea 6 years ago when picking a colour scheme for the first time that we were on a journey to become seasoned renovators and neither was it our intention. However 6 projects later, we have learnt, grown and gained in our renovation and project experience, our property portfolio and our passion for doing this.

As we sit down to write blogs and share our renovations with others – we hope it is understood that we do this after years of learning ourselves, of making mistakes and applying those lessons to develop and improve who we are as renovators, how to do it better and understand why we do this. We still have endless information and skills to learn, interior schemes to trial and strategies to employ – whilst we don’t know it all, the hard work we have invested to date has seen great outcomes to date. This series is about sharing the journey of Our Property Story to date in the hope that it will encourage others in their journey.

Whilst most people will know our journey starting from being on The Block NZ, this is really picking the story up midway through. It did not even begin with us buying our first home when we were newly married. Rather it started when Caleb was 16, still at school and became a property owner - how cool is that! So, before we start another project (which we promise is coming) we thought we would first share ‘Our Property Story’ - from back when Caleb was finishing off school to our latest home renovation. We have invited some friends to join us along the way, to provide their thoughts or to give extra advice. We hope our stories will be insightful and provide a little more background on where we have come from and what we have discovered along the way.

We are anticipating there will be some moments of embarrassment for us, as we show old photos and share how we renovated all those years ago with no idea just youthful enthusiasm. So let’s just get the worst of it out there before we change our minds huh? Here is the audition video we did for The Block NZ in 2013 explaining our third renovation in Mount Wellington. Enjoy… at our expense!