To Knock Down or Sell
We bought this house 18 years ago with a very clear plan: stay for about five years, do a few renovations, build some equity, then move on.
Like many first homes, it wasn’t bought because it was beautiful — it was bought because it was all we could afford.
It was a three‑bedroom, one‑bathroom house with a *“pool”* (using that term generously) and a shed, sitting on one acre of land just five minutes from the beach. An absolute dump. In fact, when we were searching online, I’m pretty sure I accidentally typed **“detonate”** into the keyword search instead of *renovator*, and somehow, this place still came up. 😂
But it was our dump.
And the land? The land changed everything.
Living on one acre gave us space, privacy, and a lifestyle we hadn’t expected to love as much as we did. Five years quietly turned into ten… and then somehow into eighteen. We raised kids here. We planted trees. We made memories. What was meant to be temporary slowly became *home*.
Eventually, we started talking about moving again. The plan was simple: put in a decent pool area, enjoy it for a bit, then sell and move on.
Except once the pool was done, we didn’t want to leave it.
So the conversation shifted.
What if we renovated instead? What if we added on a parent’s retreat and modernised the house we already loved the setting of?
We explored it seriously.
The quote came back: **$380,000**.
No thank you, we said.
It turns out that renovating and extending an old house, especially one that had already lived a very full life, wasn’t necessarily going to cost more than starting fresh. But we couldn’t justify spending that kind of money and still end up mostly with our small, old house. Even more importantly, it wouldn’t give us *everything* we wanted.
When we ran the numbers, something surprising happened.
It was actually **cheaper to knock the house down and rebuild** than it was to buy somewhere else that ticked all our boxes — land, location, pool, space, and lifestyle.
So here we are.
Eighteen years after buying a house we planned to keep for five, we made the big call.
The knockdown–rebuild journey has officially begun.
This blog is where I’ll share the process — the decisions, the doubts, the lessons, and the reality of starting again on land that already holds so much history for us.
Post one is really about that first question:
**To knock down… or not to knock down?**
For us, the answer wasn’t about the house at all.
It was about staying exactly where we are, and building a home that fits the life we have now.
The Dump
The Renovated Dump with a pool
