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 

The Year of Less ???

 

 

'well, I think you should change your slogan "the year of less"... these days you're going to be the proud owner not only of a house and a farm and a garden, but even of some woodland! how can you call all this "less"? '

 

I had this comment the other day from someone called Rosa, and I thought I should maybe explain to some of my newer readers who perhaps are also mystified that a Blog with the sub-heading 'The Year of Less' seems to be written by someone who is about to be the owner of one house whilst renting another, who has two cars in the family and seems to have so much going on.

 

Well we used to have more!!

 

 

Not by design, or from any collection addiction, we just moved from a small town house to a huge farm house.   We had town cars when we needed country cars, we had going out clothes, work clothes and found we needed to buy clothes that were more suited to working with animals.  We had cupboards full of crockery, drawers full of cutlery.  Four bedrooms with furniture, beds and bedding to go on them. 

 

We had so much and then the last two years hit us, hit us hard.  We each lost a parent and family became so much more important than things ever could be.  It made us re-evaluate who we were and what we wanted.

 

We decided we wanted to tread lightly on this planet, to be able to move us and our animals quickly and with as little fuss as possible.  We didn't want to leave a houseful of things to be sorted if the unthinkable should happen and we should be gone before our time. 

 

We wanted to breathe .... and be.

 

 

So this year we got ruthless, we started jettisoning everything that we didn't need.  Things we thought we loved we decided we could live without, and once some of these things go you realise how much more can actually follow, and follow they did.

 

 

Things from the kitchen cupboards to suitcases under the bed, and then we sold the suitcases, well we though we might as well, we have nothing to store in them and as long as we have one for any potential holiday, that's all we need.

 

 

I pared back makeup to the barest minimum, all jewellery except sentimental items that get worn regularly has gone.  Broken chains and charms were sent off to a gold recycler and made me almost £120, which I have decided will pay for a weekend away for us just before we start with all the decorating of our new home.

 

 

Even the emails I get, and I was getting a lot each day, have been pared down.  I unsubscribed myself from most of the daily notifications I used to get and now if I have to I can get away with 30 minutes on the computer each morning and know that I am up to date with important things .....  things that matter.

 

And that's the crux of it, we needed to find out the things that mattered and let go of those that didn't. 

 

And we are almost there, during the course of my sorting this week I have decided there are enough things for me to do one more small car boot sale this weekend.  It is the final car boot of the year at our favourite location and although Lovely Hubby will be resting after having his eyes re-lasered tomorrow, I will be able to have one final stall.  I have two boxes full of things already sorted, with a value of around £50 and I've decided if I can get this figure up to nearly £100 it will be well worth me doing one.  It will round off our total figure for the years sales very nicely.

 

For this year up to now we have taken £927 at car boot sales. Money made from things that were in our house and are now being used (or sold on) by people that needed them more than us.  They may have really needed them or merely wanted them or simply saw them as a bargain.  We saw them as things that we no longer wanted, and there were other things that we needed more.

 

The money is being spent on things for our new home, all the bitty bits that are expensive to buy, but we wanted to buy most of them new, after all they will hopefully be lasting us for a long time, we do not change things for changes sake and have made choices together based on this idea.  We have new curtains, new towels, new bedding, it's going to be a fresh new start and it has been paid for with our old things.

 

So  ... 'The Year of Less'? 

 

Yes it has been ... when we move this time there will be even less than when we moved last time, when I can finally show you pictures of our new home you will understand and hopefully approve.  It is a simple house that needs simple things, totally different from any of our previous homes, it is the home we will grow old in together, with our necessary belongings around us and nothing else to worry over.

 

There are still some things left to do during this Year of Less but there is no rush, the final few things that leave will leave naturally and in their own time.  We are happy and that sometimes comes from finding the space to breathe and the time to Be.

 

Sue xx

The Year of Less - Less Books

 

 

Yesterday was a pleasant day, and one of realisations.

 

I realised that I no longer have the need to browse through books looking at pictures of other peoples homes.  I no longer need to gather inspiration for what I want.  I know what I want in my home, and bit by bit, piece by piece as other things leave the house, the things that I want are showing themselves and I have them all.

 

This sudden realisation made it so easy to let go of so many of my books. 

 

 

Section by section I emptied the shelves ...

 

 

 ... and one by one I flicked through the books.

 

Housey ones just didn't make it back.

 

There was space left over to sort and catergorise the ones that were going back.

 

Gardening books together, self sufficiency ones together, unread cookery books together.

 

By the time I had finished, the shelves were full again ... 

 

.... all full, but now none were piled on top of others, all had a place ...

 

... and all had been looked at.

 

Yes, I still have a lot of books, but now these can be perused at leisure in the next sweep of sorting.  For now I know that all the ones of the shelves are ones that I do want to look through when I have time to do it properly.

 

I'm wondering now if the fiction books that I own will ever be read.  I am pondering at whether they will be coming with us to the new house at all.

 

It feels good to be sorting, during this Year of Less I'm enjoying that now I have even less books. I filled two plastic boxes with books for the car boot sale yesterday, books that should get us a good price, who'd have thought it, me letting go of books and feeling better for it !!

 

You can click on any of the pictures to get a closer look at the book titles that got to stay, I know I love to have a good nosey peek at other peoples bookshelves :-)

 

Sue xx

Living Simply

 

At the moment I am in full swing, simplifying our lives and our possessions, and with the prospect of hopefully, having found our 'forever home' I can visualise what we have in the rooms of our new house. 

 

It is a lovely simply shaped house that has recently been refurbished to what looks like a very good standard.  There are three bedrooms one of which we will need to use as our office, and downstairs next to the living room is an open plan kitchen/dining/conservatory room.  (Sorry but I am not tempting fate by putting any photos of the house on here until we have the keys in our grubby little mitts!!)  When we move in we intend to keep it simple, as simple as we possibly can.

 

For some reason this plan brought back to mind the house in these photos.  It was at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum, which is in Chichester and which I visited with Mum when we were on holiday together last year.  The whole place fascinated me, seeing how folk had lived through the ages and we spent many happy hours walking round the houses that had been real homes to so many people.

 

 

 

The house in these photos was the 'youngest' house on the site, I'm sorry I can't remember from what year exactly but they were built and lived in from the late 1800's.  (It, and it's adjoining semi are called Whittaker's Cottages if you have a look on the website.)  Things didn't change much from this time, especially in the countryside until after the two world wars and so many of the items in this cottage I could remember from in my grannies houses.

 

 

This is what living used to be like. 

 

 For normal folk you lived like this, no house full of things you might use once in a while, just a house containing the day to day necessities of life.

 

 

You worked to pay the rent and feed your family, you bought what you could afford to buy, there were no credit cards or adverts to tempt you to buy what you really didn't need.

 

Times were hard for so many folk I know, there are no rose tinted glasses that can make the past seem all sunny and light, but in many ways life was lived more.

 

If you wanted something, you made it, whether it was food or furniture.  If you wanted access to fresh fruit and vegetables you grew them in your own back garden or bartered with your neighbour, you couldn't wander the aisles of a large supermarket throwing into your trolley exotic fruits from other countries.

 

 

Children shared bedrooms, and played outside with each other, ball games, skipping, building dens and playing tig.  They treasured the toys that they were given (again usually handmade) for birthdays or Christmas and didn't expect something every week like so many seem to now.  Learning to knit with Mum or with Gran was more fulfilling than any solitary computer game played for hours in the loneliness of your own room.

 

And yes there are a lot of beds in this room, in the brochure it said that this house had been home for a family with Mum and Dad, a young baby sharing their bedroom and six children and plus a toddler in a cot sharing this other bedroom. Topping and tailing being the only way to sleep.

 

 

I loved the productive veggie patch in the small back garden.

 

I didn't love quite so much the outdoor 'facilities'.

 

Now there's no way we would trying to recreate this type of living at our new house, we will have running water, central heating, space for us and guests to be able to sleep comfortably.  But what I want to take from these pictures and the images still fresh in my head from the visit to this wonderful Museum is a way of living.

 

Working for ourselves to produce what we need for ourselves, producing just enough extra to give us an income and of being satisfied with what we have.  Of spending time doing things we love, not shopping for things we don't need.  Going a few steps backwards is not always a bad thing, especially when you look at folk that have already taken more steps forward and seeing the dissatisfaction in their lives with what they have and what they are for some reason, still striving to get more of.

 

We live pretty simply at the moment and it's starting to feel really good, but we are still in that jettisoning stage where we are realising how much we were suckered in to acquiring things to fill spaces and feeling the need to get rid of them to get back that space.  Another car boot sale or two and we will really be there.

 

Living simply really is the only way forward for us and this Year of Less is working in so many ways.

 

Sue xx

 

The Year of Less - Project 333 - Review of Season 1

 

 

At the end of last year I joined in with Project 333, (read more about it HERE) and I can honestly say it's been brilliant. It makes day to day dressing so easy, and when Lovely Hubby surprises me (which is not very often ... he knows that's a very dangerous thing to do) with a meal or a day out getting ready to go takes me no time at all. There's not much to think about when there are only a few items in the wardrobe that are earmarked as suitable for 'special occasions' the fact they aren't reserved for special occasions at all, but they are available for me to wear whenever I want to, is great as there simply aren't any pieces that languish at the back of the wardrobe.

 

This morning in amongst the Blogs that landed in my emails I went on a voyage of discovery and found this http://dailyconnoisseur.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/ten-item-wardrobe-questions-week-off.html a brilliant piece about having only 10 core items in your wardrobe, which is essentially the same, as you can have extras to fill out your 10 core pieces. We can all do this sort of thing but in the way that suits us.

 

Well I'm a bit late but it's time for me to re-jig my Project 333 items,  I have worn the last lot since December last year when I began, owing to the rather chilly freezing weather we've had up until this week there has been no need to switch to a lighter weight wardrobe as I was still mostly in jumpers.  But now with a hint of Spring finally in the air I do feel the need to get some lighter things out and into action.

 

So how did my first round of Project 333 go?  Well here is a little reflect back on the actual clothes.

 

Most of the clothes got worn and worn and turned out to be just right for me and my life, they will go forward to be worn again when the weather turns Autumnal later this year. A couple didn't get worn at all and a few won't be joining in another round and here they are and the reasons.

 

 

Check M&S Shirt with a silver stripe running through.

 

This shirt not worn at all. 

 

How do I know, well at the start I hung everything in the wardrobe with the hangers facing the opposite way to how I normally have them.  Putting things back after wearing or washing I hung them my normal way.  This hanger is still facing the wrong way!!  This shirt may stay for this round of 333.

 

 

 Orange M&S Jumper

This was worn once!!

 

I don't know why I bought it (except that it is in Lovely Hubby's favourite colour), it has a round neck, I prefer jumpers with a vee, it has three quarter length sleeves, something I feel uncomfortable in, I can wear long sleeves pushed up but not 3/4, a bit weird that.  SO it was sold at the last car boot and some of the cost re-couped.

 

 

Green T Shirt

 

Worn once and then relegated to work-wear. 

 

It was too baggy and just felt 'wrong'.  When you have so few clothes available to you everything has to feel 'right'.

 

Brown cords. 

 

I don't know why I included these, maybe because they looked suitable 'wintery', maybe because they were a 'Next' bargain for just £1 at a car boot sale, maybe I thought they would be warm.  But I didn't wear them out once, I put them on to wear but they were just once again 'wrong'.  I've decided I don't like cords ....full stop.  They are on the car boot rail for next time.

 

M&S Blue Jeans

 

Bought from a charity shop a few years ago for £3.99, I most definitely got my money's worth, they fell apart last week, luckily when I got home after a day out!

 

 

Green Next Jumper

 

Bought new at the start of Autumn, never worn.  I lived in the cream version that I had bought at the same time.  This will be the basis for next Winters round of Project 333.  Still a brand new cardigan :-)

 

 

Next Jumper

 

Bought new at the same time as the cardigans, worn so many times, but now almost worn out so this will go forward into next years workwear.

 

 

Cream 'Tu' Jumper

 

Worn a few times, but then it got baggy and felt much too big.  When  I was on holiday with Suky, the Pug she was cold at night (I did seem to pick the week with the most extreme cold weather conditions), so I tucked her up in her bed with this, she loved cuddling into it for a few weeks and then it went in the bin.

 

 

 These accessories were all a brilliant success but I wore the woolly scarf to bits and I had to sadly throw it away last  week, it was unrepairable :-(

 

 

 

These were all brilliant successes and, apart from the woolly scarf, will all be used next Autumn.

 

 

The shoes and boots were all good choices and have survived well enough to be brought back into action another time.

 

 

 

And this is the star of the show.

 

Worn more than any other item of clothing, when out and about, when cold in the house, worn with all the other items underneath, it seemed to match everything and cosy up every outfit.  The colour made my heart sing and my skin light up in the most flattering way.  I felt good in it, and that to me is everything.  It has washed and washed and still looks new.  If possible I need to find a lightweight Summer equivalent, as this has a thick fleecy lining and I feel would be too warm for all but the coldest of summer evenings.

 

I love it.  The star of my wardrobe. 

In fact if I had to choose a single outfit to wear for ever it would be this, a long sleeved V neck jumper, my surviving pair of jeans and my boots.

 

So today with the sun seeming to be hiding away, I intend to get stuck in to the summer weight clothes that have been packed away and do my second round of Project 333.  It shouldn't be as hard or as time consuming as the first round because I had the major sort out then, this time there is simply one rail of clothes in the spare room and a suitcase of T shirts and really Summery things to go through.  Most things that do not make the chosen 33 will be sold at our next car boot sale or a couple of favourites may be kept as spares.  Because as I have learnt through this process when you wear your clothes over and over some do wear out.  I actually like this, to wear something out means you have truly had your moneys worth out of it and that sits well with me.

 

Sue xx