I Convinced My Husband to Build a House in a Country I’d Never Even Visited

There’s a moment in every marriage where you pitch something so ridiculous that the other person has to decide whether they married a visionary or a lunatic.

For us, it was a house in Tonga.

Well, for starters, I’d never set foot on the island. Never seen the land, the neighbours, the roads. The only images I had seen were beach images from the outer islands.

And I looked at my husband and said, “We should build a house there.”

He didn’t say no. Which, looking back, was either the bravest or the dumbest thing he’s ever done.

The logic was…sort of there.

I run a marketing agency in New Zealand, but I’ve been working in marketing for over 20 years.

That’s long enough to know that the hustle never stops, the clients don’t slow down, and your brain doesn’t care that you’re on holiday. It just keeps going.

This wasn’t just burnout talking. It was also timing.

COVID had hit, and we were in the middle of trying to buy a house in New Zealand. Then the market shifted fast. The place we were looking at suddenly jumped to over a million dollars, and everything we thought we were building towards changed overnight.

So I had to pivot.

That’s something that comes to me naturally. Reading the situation quickly and moving with it instead of getting stuck in it. I didn’t have a perfect plan for what came next. I just knew I didn’t want to stay in a system that suddenly didn’t make sense anymore.

I needed somewhere else. Not a resort. Not a two-week break that ends with 400 unread emails. A real place where I could work, live, decompress, and come back to New Zealand with enough energy to do it all again.

That’s when we started seriously looking at Tonga.

It was close enough to New Zealand, it was slow, warm, and land was still possible.

So we started.

Here’s what I knew before we started: Nothing useful.

Here’s what I know now: Things are either straightforward, or they’re hard in ways you can’t predict.

Shipping a container to Tonga costs more than you think, takes longer than you’re told, and arrives when it arrives. You can’t rush it. You can’t track it the way you track a Temu order. You load it up, you pay, and you wait. Then you pay again because there’s always an additional cost.

We also needed a generator because the power goes out. Not sometimes, but regularly. If you want to work from Tonga, you need a backup plan FOR your backup plan.

Then there was Starlink. We got Starlink because the local internet isn’t reliable enough to run a business. It works beautifully until the storms come. Then it doesn’t work at all.

Building materials were another story. Finding builders, coordinating schedules across two countries, managing a build remotely is anything but glamorous.

It’s project management with a dodgy Wi-Fi connection.

It’s terrifying.

Not “jumping out of a plane” terrifying, but the “am I making a massive mistake?” kind. The kind that hits you at 2am when you’re looking at the bank account and wondering if you’ve overcommitted.

When a cost you didn’t budget for lands in your inbox. When people ask how it’s all going and you hear yourself saying, “Great,” while quietly wondering if you’ve completely lost the plot.

I didn’t come from money. I’m a 50-year-old who built a business from scratch, and every dollar that went into that house was a dollar I had earned. And every dollar I spent on something unexpected was a dollar that could have gone somewhere safer.

But safe has never built anything I’m proud of.

The internet is full of people showing you finished products. A sunset photo from the deck with “living my best life” as the caption; the carefully edited version of a messy, expensive, complicated decision.

But I want to show the process. The part where it’s half-built and over budget and you’re arguing about tile colours over a video call while your child screams in the background.

Because that’s the real story. That’s where the growth happens. Not in the after photo, but in the chaos of actually doing the thing everyone else just talks about.

Everything I know about building a house in Tonga, I learned the same way I learned to build a business. By doing it wrong first.

You plan. Things change. You adapt. Things change again. You spend more than you wanted. You wait longer than you expected.

But somewhere in the middle of all that mess, you look around and realise you’re actually doing it.

I run my agency from Tonga now. Not full-time, but regularly enough. I sit on the deck with my laptop, the generator humming in the background, Starlink doing its thing, and I do the same work I do in Whangārei.

Just with better weather and worse Wi-Fi.

It’s not perfect. It’s not finished. But it’s mine.

And nobody can take that from me.

So the real question is: Was it worth it?

Every single cent. Every argument. Every surprise invoice. Every night I lay awake wondering if I’d lost the plot.

Because I didn’t just build a house. I built proof. Proof that you can do the thing that scares you. Proof that being a single mum doesn’t mean playing it small.

Proof that you can build something even when you have no idea what you’re doing.

Your version of Tonga might be different. But whatever it is, you don’t need permission. You need a spreadsheet, a stupid amount of courage, and someone who doesn’t say no.

The rest, you figure out as you go.