Alice Stolz

So we kept pulling it back, pulling it back until we eventually landed with a sort of a

an envelope financially what we could afford and then went back to the drawing board and then got underway with it.

It really is.

And perhaps because I was sort of an older renovator, I wasn't as plucky as what you may have been at 19.

But I think also, obviously, I do some work with the block and I think that almost sort of became part of the challenge for me because I'd go on site to the block and

And, you know, each week they'd be doing another room and I just thought, great, this is just going to be so efficient and fast.

And, of course, that was not the case in reality or in my experience of reality either.

But it did sort of create a bit of a benchmark, I suppose, for ways to approach things and I think how to do design in quite an affordable way to sort of have that lovely mix of high and low in rooms to kind of give that house character and interest.

Yeah.

It's just, I think, that probably good old feeling of stress relief, isn't it?

I just really loved that whole process of demolishing certain things and then also the process also of rebuilding.

And I think it was probably the mix of physical work taking place along with the dreaming work taking place in tandem of imagining the outcome all the time was just a really wonderful experience for me.

Yes, I'm in Melbourne.

So we did go through a very prolonged lockdown.

And I think for me, there was just such a sense of nothing actually was really happening for what almost felt like two years.

So to actually watch something being built and work within a footprint of something being built was just incredibly rewarding and cathartic for me in a way that I hadn't anticipated at all.

And it was just the beauty of seeing

you know, carpenters get into spaces and joinery being done with this precision and this art form almost that I kind of found really soothing to my soul in a way that I hadn't expected.

And I think very much it was a tangible nature of something actually progressing, growing and being constructed just for me, really spoke to me during that period where the world just felt like it had been turned upside down and wasn't making much sense.

I think it is.