Life is all about choices

Hey, have you guys ever had someone say "you are so lucky" about something you have achieved?  I had that today and it makes me soo MAD!  Luck?  I do think you can attract good luck to you but managing to relocate a 100 year old house 150km to a 5 acre block that is minutes to the beach (sounds awesome I know!)- well luck had nothing to do with that, it was just plain hard work.....

We bought our 5 acre block 7 years ago.  We lived in a tiny flat in London, both had great jobs and lived our dream life traveling to where ever we wanted almost whenever we wanted. Anyway after a few wines one night we decided that we would like to have a lifestyle block/hobby farm- I'm not sure how our addled minds came up with this plan because neither of us had ever mentioned this idea before.. anyway with a few wines on board we came up with a plan..

We shall buy a lifestyle block near the coast (N.Z), so we jumped online and thats what we did, about a week later we had bought our block (site unseen) and that was that.  We never saw it until we moved back to N.Z with baby no.1 on the way (2 years later).  It was 2009 and there was the GFC.  I'm not sure how until this point I had been unaware of it but anyway we returned home to find the bank was no longer our friend.. we were heavily mortgaged with a bare block of land and 2 rentals and we still needed somewhere to live.

This was when the lightbulb went on for me... we needed to get out of debt.  Its an inopportune time to have this idea when one part of the couple stops working, a baby is born and you move countries and husbands wages halve.. never mind though I was not to be deterred.  The key I thought is to get a house on our block so we don't have to pay that debt plus rent.....

To do this we had to save $100,000!  Thats right, my husband was earning $60,000 at the time so it was going to be tough... we literally spent 2 years trying to come up with a plan while saving miniscule amounts of money.  Then we decided we would start our own business and make enough to move that house..... a year later we reached our goal and here we are.  I'll post later on how we did that but needless to say t could have gone either way and was a HUGE risk to us.... Do you think it was luck?

This is our house prior to relocating it.