Hello and welcome to our first blog post! Thank you for stopping by and showing an interest in our adventures and misadventures. I wonder if you're as excited to be here as we are... probably not, I guess that would be weird.
One day in the not too distant future, we hope to be sitting in our cosy little house bus, parked up in one of New Zealand's countless paradises, reading this post and remembering what it felt like to be writing our first blog post, and taking the first few steps of one of the biggest turning points of our lives; the making of our very own tiny house on wheels, our Little Kiwi Bus.
But that remains a dream at this stage. Let us rewind a little.
Firstly, allow us to introduce ourselves and our idea.
We are Bridget and Alex, a young couple, half of us from Wales, and the other half New Zealand. Although we still consider ourselves to be spring chickens, we have both reached that age when we're constantly being asked when we're going to settle down and buy a house. With the current state of the housing market, the answer is always the same; never. Neither of us has any desire to spend all our savings on a deposit for an average house in the suburbs, just to spend the rest of our lives paying it off. Also, our gypsy souls wouldn't be overly pleased if we tied them down in one place. They like to roam.
Both of us on our recent trip to New Zealand.
We recently spent a month travelling around New Zealand's beautiful South Island. We love New Zealand. The people are wonderful, the landscapes are breathtaking, and it's Alex's home country. So needless to say, we had an amazing time. But the best part of the trip was the hatching of the house bus idea. One day, as we were driving through the Catlins, Alex said to me, completely out of the blue, "We should live in a house bus." I couldn't quite understand how this hadn't really occurred to me before. It was my dream, but I hadn't realised it until he said it, and as soon as he said it, I knew it had to happen. I looked at him to make sure he was serious (he was) and gave him a big hug (which, in hindsight, was probably a bit dangerous while driving but it was definitely necessary). And since then, we've spoken about very little else.
At this stage, all we can do is research, learn and plan. We are currently living in Brisbane. We plan to stay here for at least a year, no more than 2, to earn and learn as much as we possibly can, then move to New Zealand and get started. So there won't actually be a Little Kiwi Bus for some time, just a concept. In the meantime, this will just be a catalogue of our progress. But a really cool catalogue. We have a lot to learn, but we're going to take it one day at a time until we're ready.
I'm going to be doing all the woodwork on the bus, so my first task is to master woodworking. And Alex needs to master welding (he can definitely be in charge of raising the roof!). Alex is also using this serverless website as a chance to build his knowledge in AWS public cloud (whatever that means), so he can work remotely from our little green home on wheels. And I'll find a way to earn a living along the way...
We would love something like this!
We are hoping to import an American school bus to New Zealand. The main reason for doing this, rather than just buying an NZ bus, is that it's a lot cheaper (even considering the shipping costs) than buying one in NZ of the same age and in the same condition. They are also wider (generally), and we love the classic dog-nosed look. We are already SO grateful for all the lovely people who have already completed their conversions, or are in the process of doing so, and have shared their journeys. We are planning to raise the roof, and without all the information readily available to us online, we wouldn't know where to start. It makes it all seem a lot less daunting, so THANK YOU!
The only thing that could potentially hold us back at this stage is the legalities of importing a left-hand drive into New Zealand. We are hoping we will be able to get it in as a Special Interest Vehicle, but this is definitely something we need more information on, so if anyone has any experience importing a left-hand drive to NZ, we'd appreciate any advice.
So that's us and our idea in a nutshell. Stick around and follow our journey; it will be a great ride, we promise, and we're absolutely raring to go!