Seven Years of Blogging

Make yourself a drink and pull up your chair this is a long one ...... because today is this blogs anniversary, seven years of posts.  Seven years of ups and downs but best of all seven years of sharing our lives with you .... our blogging buddies, friends, followers and readers.

In October of 2008 when we first placed this advert in the Farmers Guardian newspaper ... we had no idea of the adventure we were starting on.

Resourceful sea-dog (Engineer) and hard working city chick (Retail Manager) (Married) wishing a radical life style change, seek 3 bed property with space to live the ‘good life’ (veggies and chickens), ideally in a rural setting or on a farm in the Oxford, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Hampshire area. 

Willing to upgrade and refurb property in return for a realistic rent. Contact the old sea-dog (Alan) on -----------

or e-mail -----------

This blog that has charted virtually our every move, escapade and family event since then, has been the backbone of all that we have done.  Keeping us accountable and being a permanent record of our wonderful adventure.

 Expecting this search to take six months at the very least we were shocked to be contacted within days of the advert going out and offered the chance to rent a farm, complete with it's own farmhouse, barn, derelict orchard and six acre paddock. We spent the next two months closing down my sweet little lavender shop, handing the notice in on our rented house, saying goodbye to family and friends and generally just packing up our lives. Over Christmas of 2008 we moved in and a month later this blog was born.  Each year has had a subtitle and 2009's was 'From Townies to Country Folk' as the pair of us swapped smart clothes and shiny shoes for mud splattered jeans and big comfy wellies ... 

...and kitted ourselves and the farm out with what we thought we needed.  

2010 was the year of 'Pigs and Chickens' and our initial flock of ten rescued free range White Stars was added to over the course of the year.  The pigs came in small and grew and grew, providing us with meat, piglets, a small income and lots of entertainment and hard work.

2011 was 'Our Year of Living Simply' and we knuckled down to building on all we had learnt.  Reining in the spending and learning to live as simply as we could.  Growing, storing and preserving our own food, reusing, recycling and mending what we had.

But we showed our soft side when we re-homed another big batch of rescue birds, doubling our flock of the time to over 50 birds.  As our three year lease was coming to an end we sat and discussed the future, did we want to go for this lifestyle full time or revert to our townie lives.

We decided to not just carry on but to invest in our own future and buy our own land.  No matter how much we loved the area we lived in we knew we couldn't afford to buy in Oxfordshire, but we knew we had to grow our savings as quickly as we could, so we ended the lease on our lovely farm and looked for somewhere over the border in Berkshire, near to Lovely Hubby's work to rent while we saved.

  So 2012 was the year we went further, with the subtitle 'From Simple to Frugal - and Beyond'. 

We found  a ramshackle little bungalow in it's last years of life, waiting to be demolished to make room for the owners to build their dream home.  In the meantime they were heading overseas and needed someone to rent their property ...

... and look after their cat.

The pigs were gone due to family circumstances, and we were not allowed to have any on the land we rented, so we decided to downsize and buckle down and save.  So it was just us the dogs, the cats, and the chickens ... and then we went to a farm sale and fell in love with a Hyline hen and her three fluffy babies.  The geese had arrived.

Harry, Larry and Mo .... the three Chinese Grey geese replaced the pigs in our affections and made wonderful 'guard dogs' keeping our chickens safe from predators and making us laugh with their antics.

It turned out that we had two girls and one gander.  Harry swiftly decided that I was the love of his life and whenever I was in Chicken World would follow me round fawning at my feet demanding cuddles and attention.  

Then it was 2013 and we decided it was to be our 'Year of Less'.  Our little two bedroom bungalow seemed overcrowded with the contents of our four bedroom farmhouse shoehorned in, even though we had sorted out and moved with less ...so we started to declutter.  We car booted, we donated, we gave away and if all that failed we threw away.  The surfaces became clear and the bank account grew.  We worked hard, saved hard and started to dream.  We started to look for our own place ... 

and we found it.

I teased you all with a snippet of a photo while the final details were sorted out by solicitors and then it was ours on 13th September 2013.  Our forever home.  We commuted weekly and started the decorating and preparing the house, and moved in for good on 21 December...

... and on 31st Mavis joined us.

The year of 2014 was our 'Back to Basics' year and  saw us starting the long but rewarding task of setting up our smallholding, we are too small to be a farm, with around 5 acres so this is how we think of ourselves.  We (this is of course being the Royal we) dug out the hillside to mark out the bare bones of the Veggie Patch, and I learnt how different it was to grow on the poor soil of this Welsh hillside compared to the soft growing conditions of Southern England.

We also found out the difference in the temperatures and kept our log burner in action much more regularly to keep the house warm.

Then 2015 was with us and the year of 'Needs Not Wants'.  We kept our spending in the house to the minimum and gritted our teeth and invested in the infrastructure of our future.  The polytunnel was up and I could once again get down to the serious job of growing our own food ....

... while I tried to ignore what was going on nearer the house!!

A full year of building, mess, muck and chaos, I never want to live through that again.  Now of course I think that it as worth it, but at the time I hated every single minute.  But it means that we now have garage space, workshop space and most importantly a safer and more usable access and exit to the property.  

Beneath all this we put in water drains to make our land and the road beyond it safer.  We put in a water harvesting system to catch the deluge of rainwater that falls in this Welsh valley which will cut our future water bills.  Above the garage and workshop we put a huge bank of solar panels to capture the energy of the daylight and this means we are self sufficient in electricity and it will also earn us an income during the longer, lighter days of Summer.

And now we are here 2016 and 'A Year Without ...', a year that we are using as our practice year to see how self-sufficient we can be ready for next year when Lovely Hubby makes the final leap and gives up the day job.  It's been a long time in the planning and you our lovely band of regular and newer readers have been on the journey with us, some of you since the very beginning.  

Some of you have taken the massive step of reading back, seven full years of blog posts charting our successes, our failures, our experiments, our triumphs and our sad times and I guess for you they are fresher in your minds at the moment, than they currently are in mine.

Each time I look out of the window and see this glorious view I know we were right to make this little patch of Welsh hillside our own.  We drink in the view whether it be clear and filled with sunshine, or more recently with the cottages on the hillside opposite shrouded in cloud, mist or heavy rain but we drink it in, breathe in the fresh air as we walk our dogs round our own paddock and look down and across at all that we have accomplished on our land.  We know that a lot of the dreams that we dared to dream really have come true since we found our very own place to put down roots.

So I would like to take the opportunity on this anniversary post to thank everyone for reading this blog,  and to say I hope you will continue to join us on this Our New Life in the Country.  There are even more adventures ahead.

Sue xx 

'From Simple to Frugal....and Beyond'

Jointers Farm House when we first moved in 2009

'From Simple to Frugal....and Beyond'

 (one couples journey to jump off the consumer bandwagon)

Last year our sub heading under the Our New Life in the Country header was '...Our Year of Living Simply', this year we are moving on from that, our new sub heading is the one above.  In February we hope to move into our new place.  We have found a good place to rent, a two bedroom bungalow in Berkshire, it has 4 acres of land around it, plenty for our now down scaled operation without the pigs.

Jointers Farm, 4.5 acres highlighted around the house with our 6 acre paddock to the left of the picture.

Here in Oxfordshire we lease a large four bedroom (picture at the top), three bathroom farmhouse with ten and a half acres of land on which we have two huge ponds and a stone barn, it costs us dearly, but was all we could get hold of at the time that we moved.  It has single glazing and large rooms, so although the Aga does a stirling job of heating the kitchen, lots of heat just vanishes through the windows all around the house.  Every room has lots of lights and as we usually end up in different rooms doing different jobs they tend to all be on.  We could have extended this lease but we decided to be sensible, this house is also an 80 minute drive away from where Lovely Hubby works so the round trip each day adds over 2 hours to his already long 10 hour day and in turn costs us lots in fuel for the vehicles.

Now we have decided on our future, and that it includes us being as self-sufficient as possible, rather than farming, we need to save for our very own 'forever home', this entails us down sizing and having some very frugal years while we plough as much of the money that Lovely Hubby earns into our bank account for our deposit, which needs to be as large as possible, for we will then carry on living frugally while we pay off the mortgage, so LH can then reduce his working hours.

Our new home near Pangbourne

We have now signed the rental agreement on our new home for the next three years, and it will be ours from the first week in February.   Hopefully we will be able to completely redecorate (we have decided to paint everywhere white as it is a dark little house and white paint is the cheapest anyway) before we move in as it is tiny in comparison to where we live now.  Once that has been done we will move into the house everything that we need to live comfortably for the next three years.  All excess possessions or things that don't fit will be sold and the money added to our savings.

Although this too is mostly single glazed, it has a wood burner, just five small rooms and is in a nice sheltered spot instead of being in the middle of nowhere with the wind whistling round our ears like now.  Hopefully we will be able to get it warm and cosy and cut our costs dramatically.  The best thing.....it is just a fifteen minute drive from where LH works and means he will be away from the house for less time each day AND cut down dramatically on our fuel costs.

The move is just our first step on saving money, once there we can put into place all that we have learnt here on the farm and get growing our own foods, providing our own wood for the fire, over our fence to the left of the property is a  HUGE wood and we are able to forage and gather all that we need from there, so we have the prospect of free fire wood for three years.


So that's a smaller house, less land (but more suitable for the chickens and growing our own veggies), free wood for the wood burner, less fuel needed for the cars.  Now what else can we do to make next year less consumer led.....call back tomorrow for the unveiling of our main challenge for the year ahead.


Exciting times.


Sue xx

Lovely Hubby does his once yearly shop.....

Lovely Hubby does his once yearly shop..... or how to kit yourself out for the business year ahead for less than £200.

Yesterday we took a deep breathe and set off for Asda, specifically for the Asda at High Wycombe, the nearest one to us with a clothes department.  We imagine frantic shoppers, tugs of war over bargain items ......but no...when we got there the store was bare.... well almost.

We perused rail after rail of clothes, a shoppers (especially sale shoppers) paradise.  Lots of merchandise all waiting to be snapped up.  What were we after, well once a year we need to re-stock LH with some smart work wear, he has made his last two (rather expensive) suits last for about four years, but now they are showing their age so this year we were after a suit as well. 

What we didn't expect was to get everything for under £200.  A bargain!!

Our total haul - one suit jacket, two pairs of suit trousers, 7 smart shirts, 6 new ties, six casual collared T shirts, 10 pairs of underpants, 5 pairs of smart socks and 5 pairs of sports socks.

Only a couple of the T shirts were actually in the sale the rest were all at normal price.   Total spend on clothes £183, what an absolute bargain.

We kept our eyes firmly on what we needed and refused to be tempted by the cut price foody leftovers from the holiday season.  We re-stocked with a bit of fresh salady stuff and bought some bread and milk then set off for home with the rest of our hard earned cash still securely tucked in our pockets.

As we left the store, around 11.30 ish, cars were streaming into the car park, obviously the staff were in for a much busier afternoon.

Now with all the T shirts in the wash and the shirts washed and ready to iron, LH is all set for his return to work after his long Christmas break, very smart and with money still in the bank - result !

Today he is sorting through his wardrobe and moving everything 'down a level', that means the T shirts he already has get used for working on the farm, the previous 'farm' T shirts and old shirts (after removing buttons) get turned into cloths for dusting and tractor maintenance.  He owns four pairs of jeans, one pair new, one pair reasonably  good and two scruffy pairs for farm work and he has his smart leather style jacket for casual wear and a couple of body warmers and big jackets for working on the farm in and doggy walks. That's all he needs and more importantly all he wants.  His new buys will be given pride of place in the wardrobe and looked after well to ensure as many wears as possible.  He usually works four days a week at the office, so he now has eight smart shirts in total, plus a few short sleeved ones for the hottest days of Summer.

In some peoples eyes that would be exessive, in others it would be minimal, it suits us and makes life simple, I can wash and iron his shirts once a week, and so cut down on washing machine and iron use, and therefore electricity by having this many.

After our 'Year of Living Simply' this is a good start to our new year -

'From Simple to Frugal....and Beyond'

 (one couples journey to jump off the consumer bandwagon)

More details to follow.

Sue xx