Hope and Daniel Smith recently realised their dream by moving into their own house, a modest 54-square-metre home in north-west Tasmania that they took a hands-on role in building.
"It would be currently considered a one-bedroom unit and we plan to extend it in the future when we have the money," Hope says.
"Our finances decided, but we also decided, to build a smaller house."
After purchasing a block of land in Railton, about 25 kilometres south of Devonport, the couple, aged 22 and 23, were unable to secure an additional loan to fund the construction of the house.
They accepted an offer to move in with Hope's father to fast-track their savings, then started making plans to build the house they could afford. At the time, Hope was already a focused saver and Daniel was an apprentice carpenter.
Two years on, the couple share how they came to build a one-bedroom home without taking on a huge amount of debt. These are their words.
From the ground up
Daniel: When I first met Hope, she was an incredibly keen saver. She encouraged me to put aside a healthy portion of my pay cheque every week, so we had a fairly sizeable chunk of money saved by the time we were ready to buy a block.
Hope: We didn't have an interest in being in Devonport; we didn't want to be in town, but also, we couldn't afford to be in town.
I was looking very avidly and [I noticed the property] the day it was listed. We found it and went for a bit of a walk and thought about it and … put in an offer a couple days later.
Daniel: We managed to buy 3,000 square metres of gently sloping land in the middle of Railton. It was advertised for offers over $77,000 and we paid $87,000 for it.
Hope: The size of the land was quite awesome for us, so we decided to put that bit extra and we got the block.
Building a home using just our savings
Daniel: We went and spoke to the bank about potentially getting some money loaned to us on top of the loan we'd taken out for our land. At that point, the bank said they wouldn't loan any more money, because they now considered Hope my dependent because she was studying full-time and only working casually.
We decided we would just forego any more loans and try to slowly tick away at building the house with what savings we had.
Over the next 20 months, we managed to save $60,000 together and avoided having to take out another loan on top of the land. By the time everything got signed off [for us to move in], there was about $3,000 left to spare, so we made it, but only just.
We called in a lot of favours from a lot of friends for things like boxing concrete, whether they were co-workers at the company I was working at for at the time, or church friends who were also in the building trades.
They were more than happy to come out for no payment and give us a hand with the understanding that when they get up to the stage in their life when they need help, they can definitely call on me.
Hope: [The plans] extend off the current building to have a full lounge room in the future and extra bedrooms, but at the moment it has one master bedroom, a walk-in robe, an ensuite/laundry, a little dining room and then a full-size kitchen.
Daniel: [The house is] 54 square metres, so it's nice and compact and budget-friendly.
When we had our plans drawn up through a building designer, we had them drawn as a staged build, so that we could easily make the distinction of this is what we're building now, but in the bigger picture, this is exactly how it's going to stitch together.
We're looking towards planning out the next few years, with Hope finishing uni this year, and starting work next year … We want to try to time the start of the build as best we can to make it happen as quickly as we can.
Hope: There were a lot of sacrifices that we made in order to make this happen, a lot of events we missed out on, or things that we couldn't go to.
But we're so happy with how it's turned out … It's amazing, it's perfect.
Daniel: It's our dreams realised.
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