Rick and I have been in our little piece of heaven for almost 8 years now. It's the longest I've ever stayed put in the one place, I've never lived in a house longer than 5 years. I've been fearful that I've become restless, anxious and wanting to break free. I don't know if I'll ever really escape that feeling. As the years progress, I know I've surrounded myself with unwanted clutter, burying my emotions and fears with material things, so I don't have to deal with the deeper issues that lie just below the surface.
We have recently decided to purchase an large, old caravan that has had the guts of it removed and ready to be renovated. We have a small 3mx3m shed ready to put up as an extension for an outdoor bathroom, god help me during the winter months, hahahaha. We will be creating an outdoor kitchen on the deck of the caravan. We're downsizing our life to be able to live it larger and with more vigour.
We've never had a big house, rented or owned. I'm not a fan of having a big house, so much more to clean and the echoes would haunt me, as I would be alone for most of the day, just myself and my dogs. Moving from a two bedroom little cottage, to a tiny house/caravan is going to be hard; however the ability to down size our lives to something more manageable and less cluttered and materialistic, that would be more heavenly than what we have now.
I've been thinking about how all the shoes I used to wear to work when I worked in a call centre have just been wasted as they have just sat in wardrobes, unused and disintegrating from lack of use. The shoes I do wear aren't the expensive $180 shoes that are not comfortable or look pretty but are impractical. I have clothes that I have worn once, they were gorgeous on, but in the scheme of things there were no places we frequented that would require me to wear an after 5 dress.
I have underwear drawers that have bras that I hate, yet hold on to them just in case; in my head I always ask myself, "What? Just in case you stop hating them and they become comfortable?" Yup! I keep useless underwear.
I figured it's time to get real with our lives, we're not here forever and there's no real point accumulating things that will just bury us under debt and waste.
I'm planning on donating what I can to charity shops and offering them on facebook grops as a way to give back to people. We'll sell some pieces of furniture or gadgetry, in order to fund the transformation of the caravan. We'll reuse, mend, transform some clothing into floor rugs, cleaning rags etc. in order to save some finances being spent on items that can easily be created at home.
The most important thing for us is to reduce our waste.
At the moment we're making a point of going through our freezers and not buying copious amounts of food that will spoil or be forgotten. We're making our left overs that have been frozen or close to the expiry date into dog food; I swear they've never eaten this well. We want our food to be more nourishing, not just a quick and fast solution to the I'm hungry what's to eat banter that has been our lives in the last 8 years.
With this caravan we're downsizing our lives and hopefully creating something more personal and meaningful by creating a vegetable and herb garden near the caravan. We're hoping to use our grey water as underground irrigation for the vegetable garden and the fruit trees. We'd like to also use our vegetable scraps for compost and regrow vegetables and herbs from the off cuts of shallots, celery, silver-beet, coriander. Some recipes call for just one stick of celery and I abhor the idea of having to buy a whole celery bunch just to utilise one stick, so wasteful, and the celery never stays fresh in the fridge like it would if it was still in the garden thriving.
Our lives have become so cluttered, we don't know to function effectively within our own home. We joke about lost items within the spare room, un-affectionately named the cat room, as that room has become our dumping ground from what we haven't used or weren't using at the time. This in turn creates more clutter as we assume we don't have a piece of kitchenalia or manchester and purchase another one to satisfy our wants only to rediscover that item a few months later when we dare enter that cat room.
So here's to decluttering our lives and regaining a new sense of focus where it's not just us who will benefit from the change.
