When you include a history button on this sort of site, which history do you include – the home or the occupants? We don’t know either so we are doing a bit of both.

The home (la casa)

The home was built in the early 1950s as a single level “Post War Home” in the Brisbane bayside suburb of Manly. Typical of it’s genre, it was of weatherboard construction with “mixed hardwood” floors and a tiled roof. It had hardwood framing throughout faced with “horsehair” plaster.

In the 1950s, Manly was a seaside villiage that was considered to be so far away from the city that it was mainly used as a sort of holiday destination and many families had little holiday homes there. This wasn’t one of them.

As Brisbane started to grow faster and faster and to spread out in the 1980s and 1990s, Manly went from being a nice place to visit to being a trendy place for Yuppies to live. By the end of the 1990s, it had become a highly desirable Bayside suburb with people who didn’t consider a 20 – 30 minute commute to the city too demanding.

In October 1998, Rob purchased the home which had been rented out for many years and was in fairly poor condition. It was a three bedroom house with one bathroom, was on stumps that were a bit over a metre high and the less said about the interior, the better. There was no garden and two of the six trees on the property promptly fell over in a storm a week after settlement and destroyed the driveway, two fences and the neighbours’ shade house and trampoline! It’s main attraction was it’s location which is only a few minutes walk from the water.

By December 1998, a building designer (sort of like an architect) had worked with Rob for two months and completed the plans for The Renovation. As Rob was repeatedly told by everyone, they were ambitious to say the least. They included raising the house by over two metres, restumping with steel posts, laying a concrete slab under, building a new living area under and building a new garage in front and a new covered patio at the back.

Believe it or not, Rob can’t talk highly enough of his builders (R & CJ Carr) who not only completed the work quickly, amicably and to Rob’s standards (not an easy thing), but also within the budget!

Unfortunately, the house builders were not in charge of the pool that was being built at the same time. There is no pool at casadellawilson and we don’t talk about it!!!

The renovation was started on 4 January 1999 and completed to where Rob could move in by early May 1999! You can see how the project progressed by looking at the Renovation Gallery.

Rob – a very brief history
Rob was a country boy from birth and lived until his twelveth year in country NSW. He was then sent to boarding school at Shore in Sydney. He completed his last two years of school in Canberra at the Grammar School.

This is not a work or educational history so suffice to say that he is now a network engineer and moved from Canberra to Brisbane in mid 1998.

His main hobbys are travel, cooking and entertaining, family, friends and coffee. Nadia is especially happy to indulge his passion for cooking!

Nadia – a very brief history
Nadia hails from Bundaberg, Queensland, and spent all of her childhood there concentrating in her teens on family, friends and study. She left “Bundy” to attend the University of Queensland and graduated from there as a Physiotherapist.

Since then she has worked in Canberra, London and various Queensland hospitals and now works in Brisbane as a Physio.

Among her hobbies are travel, entertaining, gardening, food, wine, friends and family and coffee. She is a social being and seizes every opportunity to socialise.

Rob & Nadia
In January 2001 Nadia was a happily single professional with a circle of great friends and full social schedule. Rob was a happily single IT professional also with a large circle of great friends and full social schedule. Both were open to opportunities but, come the end of January, neither knew of the others