April was another busy month with both human and canine visitors, loads of new foraging opportunities and more destruction nasty surprises progress with the house projects. All around us there was new growth, new lambs every day and new birds returning from a winter somewhere warmer.
It has taken me a very long time to get around to finishing off the story of our van conversion. We’ve been too busy using it! There seems to have been a lot of interest in the topic recently, with van conversion page views increasing and sustaining, so I thought it was about time to complete the series of posts and finish our camper conversion journey (although, like home ownership, I am not sure we’ll ever be completely finished, with improvements being devised more or less every time we use it).
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March has been a very busy (and expensive) month. I am not quite sure where to begin. The biggest news is probably the start of the destruction investigation work at one end of the house, but we also made a decision on our next vehicle, which was definitely the biggest news by cost……….
February was generally a quiet relaxed month, with a week of frantic activity in the middle. We pottered around the house and garden, decorated the kitchen and contacted local trades for quotes for work we will need help with (building a garage/workshop, taking down a tree, hiring a skip). I also spotted something very speedy out of the corner of my eye through the patio doors. To start with, I thought it was a rat, but it had always disappeared under the deck before I could get a good look…………until one day I saw it watching me through the glass with its head poking out from under the garden furniture. It was a weasel! It took a bit of googling to differentiate it from a stoat, but its size identified it. We have seen it several times since – once with a mouse in it’s mouth, which was almost half it’s body size. They really are much smaller than I thought.
In the middle of the month, we drove almost the length of the country to help my parents move house. Having spent a stressful few days last August helping them to de-clutter, moving day finally came around.
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Unlike the the Scottish Highlands, snow is not actually that common in our SW corner of Scotland, thanks to the jet stream. While most of Scotland was blanketed for a couple of weeks, we only had snow for one morning. It was very pretty while it lasted. As the snow melted away, a huge number of snow drops have started to appear all over the place in our new garden and woodland. I have included a few photos at the end of the post.
Having spent Christmas and New Year in the Mediterranean, we got back home on 2nd January. It seemed we timed it well, as the rain stopped the day after we got home and it stayed mainly dry for a couple of weeks. It definitely wasn’t warm, but there were lots of outdoor jobs to do, so we had plenty of manual labour to keep us warm.
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2023 was our first full year of not working. After a few false starts, it was also the year we relocated to a much wilder part of the UK.
It has taken me a while to sit down and finish this, as we’ve had a run of wonderful dry weather here in SW Scotland, and I always find it hard to motivate myself to be inside when it is dry and sunny outside (if a bit chilly). Storm Isha has brought a run of over 2 weeks to an end in spectacular style, and sitting in front of the fire while rain lashes the windows and and there is a howling gale outside, seemed a good time to finish this post. Unfortunately a 18 hour power cut followed by a 4G outage almost immediately afterwards (what our internet connection is powered by) has delayed actually publishing it! Well I did say we wanted to be somewhere more wild……..
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Happy New Year! I will cover a look back on 2023 in a separate post to follow, as I’m still crunching the numbers. For now, I’ll focus on an overview of our December, which was a month of two halves. Two weeks at home in Scotland, followed by two weeks dog sitting in an apartment in Palma, was certainly a contrast!
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November was definitely a more positive month, as we got our main living spaces sorted and no longer had to do any driving backwards and forwards between our new home and the rental house about an hour away. We handed back the keys to the rental on 1st November, so it’s been nice to be able to focus on one place.
Apologies for the doom and gloom in last month’s update, but I did promise to share our journey warts and all. I have always said that if there weren’t any downs, then the ups wouldn’t be ups. October was mostly a down. Getting out and about to explore our new surroundings in autumnal sunshine and the sense of achievement gained from completing tasks and seeing progress, saw us bounce back in November.
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My memories of October are mostly of torrential downpours every time we needed to move our belongings from house to van and van to new house. The trips we did on our own in the campervan, we were able to wait for it to ease off a bit, but the two days we hired a larger van and had a couple of friends to help, there was very little let up. To add to the soggy furniture being moved in, we also discovered a bit of a damp issue at one end of the house☹️.
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It happened at last! After 1 year, 9 weeks and 6 days of housesitting, campervanning and renting; on the 14th September, we got the keys to a home that we own. It is an eclectic mix of 18th century shepherd’s cottage and 1980’s additions, but it was the 2 acres of garden, woodland and scrubby wild areas surrounded by farmland and wilderness that was the real draw. Having looked at all sorts of different property options and building plots, we decided that being in a ‘nice spot’ with few neighbours and plenty of wildlife was our top priority, which meant we could be less fussy about the house itself. It turns out that our purchase also includes a rather wilful chicken.
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Finding Enough 