Hi, we're Estella & Gabriel.
We had a pretty good life in Singapore. Good careers on a good path, a loving family, wonderful friends, a city that runs like clockwork, cheap flights to anywhere in Asia, a passport that opens most doors, and access to some of the best food on earth. We weren't looking for a way out.
And we decided to leave it all behind anyway, to build a house in a country at the corner of the world. Why, you may ask? One simple reason: we think life is short, and beautiful. We had a window, we had each other, and we wanted to know what it feels like to build something from scratch, somewhere completely different, while we still have the energy to do it. Singapore will always be home. But we didn't want to spend the next ten years wondering "what if." So we made the choice.
This site is the record of that. The journal is the honest version, written as it happens. The resources are the polished tools we built along the way, cleaned up and made useful for anyone doing something similar.
We wanted somewhere where the priorities feel different. A slower pace of life, more time for the things that actually matter: weekends that aren't recovery from the week, dinners that go long, space to cook properly, mornings with the mountains on the horizon instead of a commute.
We looked hard at five cities before we picked one (that's the comparison report sitting in the Journal, if you want the receipts) and landed on Canterbury.
We're building a single-storey home in Darfield, and we're doing the whole thing from Singapore, roughly 7,500 km away: contracts, appliance selection, heating rules, elevations, the lot. Over email, video calls, and a truly unreasonable amount of research.
It is, most weeks, going well.
Almost everything here started as a DM. Someone would ask how we compared cities, or got an IRD number from overseas, or chose a cooktop, and we'd send over the checklist or spreadsheet we'd already built for ourselves. Eventually there were enough of those that a website made more sense than answering the same question a hundred times.
So that's what plus65minus1 is: the actual tools that got us through, cleaned up just enough to be useful to someone else, and free. All of it, always. Fair warning: some of our spreadsheet decisions were questionable at best. We've left them in anyway.
We read everything. The fastest way to reach us is Instagram @plus65minus1, where most of this began, or the contact page if it's a longer story. If you're doing the same slightly mad thing, tell us where you're stuck and we'll very likely make a spreadsheet for it.
The things we can't fit in the container are going into these pages instead.
Everything on this site is free and always will be. No paywalls, no gated content, no affiliate links. We built these resources for ourselves and figured someone else could use them too.
That said, the site takes real time and money to keep running: the research, the writing, the hosting, and the small mountain of spreadsheets behind every guide. If anything here saved you a few hours or a few headaches, you can support us here. It helps us keep making these, and it means a lot.