We had a change recently in the little community where I now live. One of my immediate neighbours – who had been there for over two years – decided it was time to move on. As a result, her little island was up for grabs, and this being a popular location, it was long before it was snapped up.

My new neighbours – whom I’ve admittedly let to meet – set about re-working the land, and as a result got me thinking about my place.

As regular readers might know, I recently revised things at home in order to get a better fit for my burgeoning interest in SL flying and boating and to give friends room to moor their boats when visiting. While I was pleased with what I had, things still didn’t feel entirely “right”. That’s where the new neighbours come in: as a part of landscaping there island, they utilised cliff-like rock forms to assist in giving the land an elevation change, and that set a little light bulb off in my head.

Axel Bergan produces some low LI materials-enabled cliffs which are sold through Novocaine Islay under the InVerse brand. At 30×13 metres, copyable, resizeable and re-linkable and at an LI of 4 (8 if you want added vegetation on them) they represent great value. So, with my box of cliffs tucked under one arm, I set about fiddling with things.

Without wibbling on at great length, the outcome (which has taken the last couple of days to get sorted), is to flip the overall layout of the island around – boasts and planes now sit at the north end, the house at the southern end, elevated on a rocky plateau of cliffs. As my garden is important to me (I’m not at all green-fingered in the physical world, so I compensate for things in-world), that now sits between house and moorings, also slightly elevated above the latter, but sitting below the former, with a further small elevation sitting between it and the moorings, where I have a broad lawn and the helipad (the lawn allows me to indulge in a little SL skydiving).

The garden retains the terrace and gezebo, but the reworking has allowed me to add further flowers and wild plants. To link it with the other sections of the island “above” and “below” it, I picked up Alex Bader’s Mesh boardwalk set, and used that to create steps linking everything. As an added bonus, this also allowed me to add a little cliff top walk over a rocky promontory I added to the east side of the island, and include some additional piers for mooring the float ‘planes.

As a result of stunting things around, I also decided to retire the “frame house” I’ve occupied since moving to the USS regions. While I like the build and got the entire structure down to just 24 LI, I felt the repositioning of things warranted a change. So I pulled the Guest House out of my Fallingwater inspired build out of its box and set about re-purposing it. For some reason, the version I found dated from 2012, so needed a fair amount of work. Thanks to a little trimming and the used of convex hull, I reduced the initial LI from 109 to 44. With a little help refurnishing the house from Cory Edo,

All told, the LI for the “new” place is 885. When you consider that precisely 300 of that is boats and ‘planes, you can probably guess why I’m pleased with things. I might even leave it like this for a while!