And now.... exhale.

Well it has taken me a long while... but I am finally ready to do an update! We were very busy for a while moving to our new home (and all the usual dramas that brings!), then within a few weeks we were busy again with family staying from overseas, but I am very pleased to report we have all settled in to our new surrounds beautifully.

Early morning mist in the valley

We love the house - which is much larger than we are used to but strangely not too big at all - it still feels cosy in the right places! Our kids now have a very large open playroom with lots of tables for creating, and shelves for their books and games. They just love it! And we love not tripping over toys and standing on lego in the lounge room.

We even get to watch the sunset from our dining room, or upstairs out on the balcony, something that always stops us in our tracks.

Sunset from our balcony

We love the area too - very peaceful and beautiful, friendly people and the village is perched on an escarpment overlooking magnificent valleys, which provides us with fabulous bushwalks!

Our local bushwalk/ dog walk- only a couple of minutes away

All animals made it through the move too. At the time we had 2 chooks broody and the other 3 moulting, so they looked a bit rough for a while, but are back to normal now -fat, feathery and happy! We are even getting a decent egg supply, 10-12 a week which is great considering the colder weather.

It didn't take me long to get a food garden going- I was planning it within 2 weeks and building shortly after! With nothing in place to start with, we picked a sunny area across the back of the garden, and built a long garden bed 6 metres x 1.2 metres, using whatever we had to hand, and bought in 2 cubic metres of 'veggie mix' soil to make a raised bed. Excellent stuff, full of manures and mushroom compost! I will post some pictures of the patch soon when its looking a bit greener, but already everything has germinated and so we have a bed full of little green sprouts, ready to provide us with winter goodness. I planted lots of winter greens, peas, broad beans, broccoli, herbs.... and am waiting on my potatoes and garlic to arrive, though I'll have to extend the patch as its full already!

This house has also inspired me to try something new in the garden- flowers! I've always admired others gardens that burst with glorious colour, but to be honest I kind of thought flowers were a bit frivolous, after all isn't this the age when we should all be turning our land into something more productive? Well, I'm not sure exactly what changed, but you know what? For the first time, I think I deserve some frivolous flowers!! Of course, when I've waited this long, I'm not doing things by halves, so I bought 2 bulk packs of Spring bulbs from Garden Express, a total of a whopping 405 bulbs!!! Sounds a lot, but some of them are really small ~ lol ! A bit crazy, maybe. But we have space on all sides of the house, with lots of deciduous autumn trees (which looked amazing when they turned) so some will go under the trees, others will be planted outside our windows and some in pots.... I'm sure I'll find a place for them. Watch this space and see how I did!

Its all a work-in-progress of course, there is always more to do in the garden and inside, but it feels like we are home again at last, and I can finally exhale.

:-)

Ready, set, GO!

Well as I hoped we have certainly hit the ground running this year! Lots happening in our little world- the biggest news is that we will soon be moving again! Everything has finally fallen into place for us and life has become a whole lot easier this year.

Following my last blog post we did some major house hunting around the area (our record was 10 houses seen in one day!) and I am very happy to report we found a truly fabulous house- Woohoo!! It ticks all the boxes for us, and much more! It is a much bigger home than we have ever had, but somehow still feels cosy and homey inside which is important to us. It has that 'good energy' kind of feeling that is hard to describe, but you know when you find it. There are enough rooms to host our family from England when they visit (and they are coming....!) AND I get my very own dedicated sewing/craft room! There is an ENORMOUS family room, perfect for lounging around/ kids toys/ art tables/ lego villages ..... oh how lucky we are! On top of all that we got it for a really great price, far less than we budgeted for or expected, which means much less financial pressure. YAY!

The block is pretty much average size, but we will have 2 gardens due to the layout. One is a bit park-like and peaceful, the other is fenced and perfect for our children /dog/ chooks. The gardener in me is already planning fruit trees and veggies, though I will try to be patient and get to know the place first to plan it. As it stands it is really quite pretty and will be nice to move into.... until I get the itch to don my gardening gloves and grab the spade and secateurs !!!

We are all very excited about it, the kids are happy as it has stairs (strange fascination!) and they can choose their bedrooms and have their own bathroom (though unfortunately not the ability to clean it themselves lol!)

We are currently in that odd period of waiting for settlement, hopefully it won't seem like a lifetime, although clearing out our 'stuff' will definitely fill a fair amount of time. Where does it all come from? I admit I am was a bit of a hoarder, but really we are not the kind of people that buy or keep a lot of 'stuff', and yet our garage tells us otherwise........ :-(

A few other things happening too, but since I have raved on so much I will take a break now and post again later!

The changes we had to have....

Warning- this is a long post! Getting it off my chest at last.... (you might want to get a cup of tea!)

I've been putting off blogging about our lives for a while, part denial, part hope that things will somehow all work out as we planned. But I have found that I can only wait so long for the good luck fairy or fate or mother universe or whatever you believe in, to bestow the goodness upon us. Some big decisions had to be made, and some big changes had to happen.

Some of you will know we bought a block of land over 2 years ago with all the hopes and dreams of building an amazing home for our family, and managing the land to live as sustainably as possible. We would have a home that would be as green as possible (for a project home) built facing north and a long homestead style designed to be solar passive, with solar power and huge water tanks. The chooks would have a large run, and I could have a rooster again and breed wyandottes. I would try to work their area into my food forest plan, permaculture style with raised rotational veggie beds and a small orchard of fruit trees.

Sounds idyllic? We really thought we could do it. We have come very close. It has been 2 and a half years of planning and working with builders, discussions with council and the RFS, struggling to make our dreams a reality. I can't express in writing what we have been through, but it has been so much hard work- blood, sweat and certainly tears.

I love that land. We all do. We knew the moment we saw it that it was for us. There were 'signs' everywhere. It is totally unique, 22 acres of amazing bushland, with views to world class bushwalk areas and canyons. But is is more than the description to us. It was our dream.

So what has happened? Well, the dollars required have increased (as these things usually do) and our dollars available have decreased. The council and RFS have changed our plans from our dream to 'something-kind-of-close'.

But the biggest change of all has been our thinking. We sat down and worked out what kind of lifestyle we would be living if we continued down this path, following our dreams. We worked out how much it would take from us, and for how long. Even if we could fund the building work, we would be paying for it for a very long time. Its not like we didn't know at the start, but somehow our priorities have changed over the past 2 years, and 'living the dream' at the expense of actually enjoying life just seems so wrong. The important thing is that we are all together, healthy and as happy as we can be.

We don't want to be always worrying about money, whether we can afford school excursions, Christmas, kids parties, not to mention emergencies like illness or car problems (having just lost our car has made this foremost in our minds!) I know lots of people do have to live that way through no fault of their own, but why would we choose to live that way when we can choose something else?


We had planned on selling our old home to help finance this dream, but after 8 months of having an empty house for sale while we pay rent where we are just wasn't working. We know for sure that we don't want to go back to our old town, so the first decision was to take our old home off the market and rent it out. This way we can get some income at least, and the house is being lived in.

The same day we made that decision, we decided to put the land up for sale. We had agonised over it for so long, that it was actually a relief to do something about it. It felt like I was taking charge again, instead of waiting for it all to somehow work out for us.

So, less than 2 weeks later - tenants moved into our old house on the weekend (we had a choice of applicants within 3 days!) and the land went up for sale on Friday, with an interested couple visiting on Saturday and have already put in an offer which we are negotiating at the moment.

All of a sudden things seem much clearer and easier. Have you ever struggled on down a path in your life thinking the best things are worth fighting for? I thought they were, but now I am not sure. Maybe the hard struggle is not the way to go. When things seem to fall into place easily, maybe that is meant to be.

If this works out and we sell the land soon, we plan to buy a house again. A regular house, probably in a regular street. It will not have acres, but it will be big enough to grow some veggies and maybe a couple of apple trees. Our kids will love it and it will become our home.

It will not be our old dream, but it will be our new dream.

:-)