We "sold" our house for free!
Why demolish when you can relocate?
This has been one topic we have received loads of questions on, so we thought we’d better give you some of the ins and outs of how we relocated our house. After posting our ad on Gumtree, we were inundated with enquiries. It seems so strange that there is such a market for relocatable houses, but apparently, there is! Within a week we had it “sold”.
Here’s a photo of our Gumtree advertisement:
As with all things building, unexpected obstacles can get in your way ha! A month later the original people we had locked in to remove the house had to withdraw as their land sale fell through. This was not ideal! Hot tip: don’t choose someone because of your first in best dressed morals, choose someone that already has land! Lesson learned.
Thankfully, friends of ours referred us to a house removalist, Robert Mannix. Robert knew of someone looking for a house to put on their vacant block immediately. Alice and Tibor of Living Joy who ‘bought’ the house have completed multiple house relocations and are creating sustainable and affordable housing. This was a perfect fit for us. It aligns with our values, solved a problem and saved us close to $20k in demolition costs!
After confirming the sale, the agreed timeframe was reached and unfortunately this stretched out to an extra three weeks. Super frustrating for ol schedule freak Luke, however we had no control over it and had to run with it. The Orton Building team have since caught up two of those three weeks by working insanely hard. They seriously are blowing my mind with how much they can get done, in such a short amount of time and to such a high standard! Anyway another hot tip: allow extra time for these things. You are at the mercy of whoever is removing the house.
They cleverly cut the house in half and took it in two truckloads over two nights.
The cool thing is that the house will be given a new lease on life and restored to a new beauty in Maryville. We can’t wait to see it reattached!
So should you consider house relocation for your place?
Here are the benefits of house relocation:
The environment!
You are saving, in our case, a structurally sound house from landfill. Big tick. You are essentially recycling a whole home, in fact 95% of the house is salvageable throughout the process. I know - mind blown!Cost saving:
We saved on demolition, they save on a free house! It seems such a shame to demolish a structurally sound house. It can also provide good quality low-cost housing. Amazing!Time effective
For the people taking the house, it is much quicker than building a new one. For us, it added a little extra time to our process, but in our minds, it was worth it.
A few extra things you should know:
If you are considering relocating your house the first thing to do is to engage an experienced, qualified and insured house relocation contractor to assess the house to see if it can be moved.
You need council approval for demolition to have your house relocated. The people on the other end also have to complete a council application to have a house relocated onto their land.
House transport prices and processes can vary, so make sure you look into the best one for you.
I hope that answers all of your questions! If not be sure to direct message me on Insta :)
Love,
Jus