Reflections

Have you ever met someone and just click, someone you share the same dreams and goals in life. That is what happened when I met my husband over 12 years ago, together we dreamed and dreamed big. 

Our first dream was to travel around Australia, which we did for our honeymoon 18 months after we started dating. The second dream was to buy a couple of acres to raise our family on, Paul grew up on a rural hobby farm in W.A, where his father practiced permaculture principles. Buying acreage now was out of our budget as we were just 20 and 23 and we were about to travel for 12 months on our big lap of Australia so we bought a large suburban block with a small home on it. 

On our trip we were to meet up with one of my husbands old school mates, he was now living on 150 acres 1 hour out of Perth W.A and he taught us about heirloom seeds and what large scale corporations were doing to our food and seeds. This sparked a passion within both of us to start producing our own food, so we would not only have food security but a clean source of organic produce as local as we could get it. When we arrived back from our honeymoon we established out very first veggie patch with mixed success, as we lived on the side of a hill with filtered light from the many trees on our bush block. 

With the arrival of our first son and plans for a second child we soon out grew our first house but continued to look for acreage, still we could not find anything in our budget - a search made worse by Melbourne's housing crash in 2011. We decided the best thing for our small family financially would be to buy a run down property in Melbourne's outer East that we would slowly renovate ourselves with the intention to sell for a profit. 

Renovating was tough, we had the skill set, but time to complete a full overhaul was not plentiful. Paul was working 6 days a week, we were finding it hard to save for materials, and find the time to renovate, months would pass with no tools being picked up. There were times that I would think this would never end, that we would be stuck in our suburban hell, with unfulfilled dreams. We were stuck in a rut, running the rat race, paying bills, making ends meat, working our butts off after hours to try and slowly transform the home we were living in into some thing beautiful that would one day become our stepping stone. 

6 years after moving in we were getting close to completion but we were both exhausted physically and mentally, we now had 3 children and we were even more time poor. We had completed most of the major tasks, a new kitchen, new bathroom, and ensuite and all the 4 bedrooms, study and living areas were done, but it still felt like an uncomplete mess. 

The turning point is still vivid. I had gone away for a week with the kiddos since Paul couldn't take any more time off, and during this time the house next door which had been vacant for 6 months had new tenants move in, and they liked to party 1 meter away from our bedroom window, all night every night. I had more sleep with 3 newborns combined, and I was increasingly more frustrated with the situation we were in, we had finished our bedroom and ensuite renovation just 6 months prior and now I was sleeping in the lounge room, on the couch, just to get a few hours of unbroken sleep. How was this fair, we had worked our butts off all throughout our 20s so we could live our dream, and now we couldn't even enjoy the hard work that we had done. 

After a few months of this, I remember Paul walking out of our front door to meet me as I was pottering in our veggie patch which we had established in our front yard, and I suggested that we cancel the trip we had been talking about, the trip we would take our kids on to celebrate 10 years of our marriage, and use that time as the final push and finish the home so we could sell and make the leap. My argument was if not now when? we were now in our early 30s, this was our prime time to transform a farmlet into a productive garden that would someday feed our family and friends. 

So we did it, a final push of 3 months with a list as long as my arm, we worked day and night, with a goal to have our home finished by our 10 year wedding anniversary. We weren't far off, we added 2 weeks to the proposed finish time but we did it, our home was finally ready for sale. 

The real estate agent and auctioneer warned us that the housing market had slowed down again after a massive boom, here we were selling our house in market conditions less than ideal, again. The houses the auctioneer had called the day of our auction, beautiful houses which would usually be snapped up had between 0-2 bidders. This was highly unusual for Melbourne's market considering what had been only a few months before. 

But  I felt strangely confident walking into our Auction, the turn out was phenomenal, our outdoor area was maxed out, people were outside our gate, people were inside our kitchen, people were in our back yard, in the end we had 6 bidders and we had reached reserve, our magic number, it was soon called, SOLD, blood sweat and tears, so many tears we had now ended a chapter and we would soon start another. 

Smiles, laughter, tears of joy and champagne flowed that night, but the real nerves were to come. We had been forced to change our search locations, our first preference had been the beautiful Yarra Valley, but as Melbourne's housing prices had slowed right down, the prices in the Valley had not, we were priced out again, devastating, as our beautiful home was now on the market and their was no turning back. 

That's is when we broadened our search range, we had now included Western and Southern Gippsland in our search, exciting as we could now get more bang for our buck. I had spied a property on an online real estate site, it was perfect, it ticked all the boxes, even the most obscure. It had been on the market for over 3 months and had recently been lowered in price, it was now in budget. It was a 54 acre parcel of land, much bigger that what we were first looking at, which had an established orchard, although neglected, a veggie patch, chicken runs, a water source or seven, sensational views, solar power, a kitchen with everything I could desire in it including my wood fired oven and stove, pig sheds, more sheds, twenty something sheep and a whole lot of potential for us to transform it into a permaculture homestead, where we could become self sufficient in all aspects of our life. 

So we put our offer in and with some negotiating we bought it, and waited the longest 3 months we have ever waited. We have now been here for 147 days, we have added so many animals to the farm, a ram, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese and guinea fowl, we have planted many fruit trees, we have planted out the veggie gardens, harvest from those veggie gardens and created a veggie patch bigger than our large suburban block, the one we sold to come here. 

This is our story of living our dream, will you follow us as we continue to transform this 54 acre farm into a productive dream, through all its trials and tribulations. Dreams to feed our family and friends, dreams to spend more quality time together as a family, dreams for our kids to live a childhood outdoors, like the good old days, dreams to get closer to our roots, our traditions, and to just be content on simple and simply living.