Ahoy!

Haha soooo after lurking and madly reading everything I can in here for months I have decided to finally say hello! Not that we even own a block of land or even a house, but we are desperately saving like mad so that hopefully in about 12 months time we'll be in our first house & acreage. But until that happens I'll be hanging around trying to learn what I can about goats...and pigs..and chickens..and goats again...

I definitely have the crazy country fever

Welcome, Buttons, a great place to ask as many questions as you can think of

Hello and welcome. This is an awesome site, even though I am a townie I read heaps of the rural/LSB stuff, so interesting.

Hello and welcome. I hope your dream comes to fruition.

Welcome.
Goodluck with the savings. When it comes to getting some help from a bank make sure you shop around as some lend more on a lifestyle property than others - i.e some only lend 80% whilst others will go as high as 90%......

Welcome along .. glad to have you aboard

Welcome! I bet you'll find it useful reading along - I know I picked up some things to look for while we were still searching for our place. Good luck in the hunting!

Thanks everyone! I will definitely be using a mortgage broker when the time comes but until then I'll just keep daydreaming about my future mini farm.

Ahoy there & welcome!

Feel free to ask as many goat questions as you like!

So I thought I'd post a wee update about our situation as some of you may recall we were saving our pennies for our first house/LSB.

We probably looked seriously for about 4 months and then less seriously for a few months before that while trying to get pre-approval from the bank as we had less than 20% deposit. We're in Auckland which makes things a little hard as the market is crazy insane up here. We were originally aiming for about 3-5 acres but couldn't find anything that felt "right". Many of them were nice (even more that were awful) but they just didn't feel like they were meant to be our home.

We put an offer on an awesome 5.5acre place that was accepted but we pulled out after some significant issues with weather tightness were revealed on the building inspection. Instead of feeling upset we were relieved which came as a bit of a shock as we had thought it was everything we wanted. I've had some health issues over the last 6 months and in the background was a wee nagging feeling that we'd be taking on more than we could handle with my health as we also work full time. I was born and raised on a farm so know what's involved with owning land and stock.

So super long story short we've ended up in a super cute character house that's been mostly renovated on half an acre with established fruit trees. It has everything we wanted except the extra land and I'm so in love with it.

I'm glad we didn't go bigger as I couldn't of managed it at the moment and some days just planning out my garden feels exhausting. I've inherited 2 chickens and hope to get some ducks and that should keep me going for the next couple of years until we're able to manage more and move onto something else

Ultimately all I really need in life to keep me happy is a big vege garden, fruit trees and some perculilar poultry and I've at least achieved that.

When we lived in town, I had 10 hens (no roosters allowed) and all the neighbours bought our surplus eggs. We were on 1614 sqm, so about 1/3 of an acre and with a very good orchard. We also had great garden soil so grew most of our own vegetables with extra silverbeet for the hens, so it can be very rewarding.
Hope your health improves and you get to live that dream.

Thankfully we're still in the country with heaps of privacy

I could never quite live in town having always lived rural. We made the right decision as I've been on partial sick leave since we moved. Figure we'll enjoy this for now and and upsize in a couple of years. The smaller mortgage is pretty good too