Phew, what a scorcher! June was very atypically hot and dry in S W Scotland, we even hit 30 degrees for a couple of days. I am not sure our friends and family really believed it was 10 degrees hotter here than down south at the start of the month, but we made the most of it while it lasted. We enjoyed a much calmer month, mostly in one place after a rather hectic May.
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May was a VERY expensive month!! We do now have somewhere to call home, if only temporarily. We had already signed up to a couple of house sits before we knew that would happen, so 10 days of May were spent the other side of Scotland. This coupled with several trips down south in a short space of time, meant we only actually slept in our new home for 9 nights last month, and one of those was with no furniture!
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My update is rather late this month. April has certainly been eventful, and not always in a good way, and May is shaping up the same way so far, but more about that next month. We started the month calmly in South West Scotland in a lovely rural house surrounded by wildlife, waterfalls and plentiful supplies of wild garlic (one of my favourite foragable ingredients). We only had one cat to look after, so we were free to do whatever we wanted most of the time….so long as a warm lap was provided at least once a day. We didn’t know it at the time, but this was the calm before the storm.
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March was a little unusual in that we spent most of it based in one place. We finished February at the house of friends in rural Northumberland, and spent most of March there too, while they were away. We made the most of the beautiful surroundings and took to taking evening walks just before sunset to watch the hares. One evening we counted 11! We also took advantage of the proximity to Hadrian’s Wall, which neither of us had ever visited. We walked a 4 mile section including Sycamore Gap, which you may recognise in the photos at the end, even if you have never visited, as it has been used as a filming location many times.
Our friends do not have pets except for a tortoise, who needed very little care apart from occasionally checking he remained buried in the heated area of his enclosure while it was cold out. This left us free to focus on hunting down and reacting quickly to rental properties becoming available.
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We started February in Norfolk, but soon ventured north again for a couple of dog sits. We hoped that the approach of spring would bring some new property to the market, so wanted to be in striking distance if anything interesting came up.
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The first week of 2023 was a bit of a non-event, being spent recovering from the lurgy with my in-laws. Luckily, both Mr W and I tested negative in time to head off to our next house sit, eliminating the need to have any difficult conversations with the homeowners. As we had written off December and January as dead months for house hunting, it didn’t really matter where in the country we were based. We searched for housesits in January for a minimum of 2 weeks and came up with a few options, by far the best of which (for us anyway) was in south Shropshire.
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I conceived this blog at the end of 2019, when we had just hit our FIRE number. Back then, it would have been very easy to keep plodding along as before for fear of making a change and getting it wrong. I didn’t want that to happen. What’s the point of all that saving and investing if we didn’t take advantage of the freedom fund as the enabler it was intended to be.
In May 2021 I reduced my working hours from full time to 50%, and in July 2022 I stopped being an employee altogether. I guess that means I spent 25% of 2022 working for someone else. It is now almost 6 months since my last salary landed in my account, and I can honestly say I don’t miss working. I do miss some of the people, but have made an effort to stay in touch and meet up with friends when I have been in the right area. That is the one of the major downsides to our current nomadic lifestyle, the amount of time we spend with other people is much reduced. That and the inevitable occasion when it would be really useful to have something to hand that is packed somewhere in a shipping container…..
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Having accepted not much was going to happen on the property front for the next few months, December was partly spent with family and partly spent in a rather palatial (but very cold) house sit in Suffolk. Sadly, having seemingly outrun CoVid for nearly 3 years, it caught up with us just in time for Christmas 😦
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Thankfully there is no new Prime Minister to talk about this month, but plenty of cost of living doom and gloom. The outlook for our planned property purchase is sadly not much more cheerful than the current UK economic outlook. Having started November hopeful that we might be in before Christmas, with our seller agreeing to move into rented accommodation and rent back the grazing, things changed quite quickly. We haven’t quite drawn a line under the idea of this particular smallholding, but the seller can not find anything suitable to rent (near enough to her livestock). After her planned onward purchase fell through, she found something else she was keen on, but last week she was outbid at the closing date. This leaves us almost back at square one, but with much less currently on the market 😦
Continue readingAnother month and another UK Prime Minister! The idea would have been ridiculous not long ago, but now anything seems plausible. It’s at times like this I’m quite glad I am not working with colleagues around the world anymore. It was embarrassing enough having blustering Boris representing the UK, but the antics of the last month have been absurd. Let’s hope the grown ups have now taken charge and those in government remember who they are actually working for.
While the media have been having a field day and financial markets have been in chaos, we endured yet more obstacles to buying our smallholding.
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Finding Enough 