CHAPTER 1. HUMBLE BEGINNINGS (P.1)

This is the story of how the Nook came to be. A journey of life’s twists and turns, love and loss, friends and family, teamwork and support, dedication and dreaming. Thank you to all of those involved and all of those yet to be. See you all at the little house on the hill.

Holly and I had been “living tiny” for about four years. We completed the bulk of the construction of this little house, known as the Nook, in November 2020, 32 months after starting in mid 2018.

I grew up on a larger property, just over the hill behind the Nook that encompassed the block the Nook now sits on. I had a humble upbringing, Mum was an artist/art teacher and Dad a retired farmer.

At the age of 52 dad finished up farming and met mum, he was chasing a dream that had been rolling over in his mind for years as he monotonously drove machinery hours on end during harvest season in the Wimmera. That dream was to build unique cottages and run them as a tourism accommodation business.

Mum and Dad built four individual cottages made entirely from recycled materials. Each cottage is uniquely designed and uses just one type of material to create the overall structure of the dwelling. In the end there was: a redgum log cottage, a red brick cottage, a mud brick cottage and a stone cottage.

The property used to be run as a dairy farm. When we moved there, we used the old dairy shed as our workshop, the size of which I unknowingly took for granted, only to fully realise the convenience of a large workspace during the construction of the Nook when I was operating out of an old scout tent.