Hey, guess what? We have moved to the country!

Yes it is true.

I have been away from my blog for a while, as we have been busily preparing for the move.
It has really happened, we have packed up our life in Sydney and have moved an our and a half away from the city.
If I go outside, I can hear cows mooing down the street. BTW It is really freaking out our cat!
We have been here a couple of weeks already.

More to follow….

Decluttering Update #15 Garage

I am gradually starting to notice that the decluttering in the garage is starting be noticeable.
But it is a work in progress.
I’m not breaking any decluttering records here, but slow and steady and I’m making it into a regular habit.
I figure if I slow down the clutter coming in to a reasonable dribble, and declutter more that what comes in its a good month!

Here is what left the garage today- an old 2 metre high Christmas tree. We have had it for 10 years. We had received it second hand then! We dropped it off to the local Charity shop today. I’m sure it will find a new family soon. Also was a gold wicker Christmas tree, about 1 metre high.

Also was a box of plastic containers with lids. I had been storing these in the garage following my decluttering of my kitchen earlier this year, just in case I needed them. However, as I haven’t needed to dig them out of the garage, they are surplus to requirements so, off they go to a new home via the charity shop.

Radical Homemakers

I have been reading the book Radical Homemaker by Shannon Hayes.
Well actually this is my second read, as this time I am reading it and making notes as I go.
As the blurb on the back of the book says:
” Radical Homemakers is an inspirational book featuring stories of people who’ve cast aside the pressures of a consumer culture and quit their jobs to live a simple life of self-sufficiency and foster relationships within their own local communities.”

At times it is a bit tedious to read with some very ordinary verbatim quotes from people in her study which would have been better to paraphrase!

But she has a very strong message.

Personally I’ve always struggled with the housewife thing. The author distinguishes between being a housewife of the 50′s and 60′s where the role started to be about home being a consuming entity instead of a producing entity. Hence the emptiness of the role and women being isolated and alone in their shiny new homes in a subdivision with no community infrastructure . I could relate to that as I experienced that myself for a couple of years after my daughter was born and I stayed at home after being a career woman.

Shannon instead promotes the idea of being a Radical Homemaker, which involves a lot of making meals from scratch, producing or growing, making many things we need in the home, or sharing or exchanging goods and services within our community of friends and family, rethinking how we educate our children, learning new skills and connecting with family, friends and community.

This is what I am aiming for in my simpler living journey.

Clutter to Cash Result for October $220

Our clutter to cash for October was successful.

I sold the following on ebay:

A child’s blackboard easel $15

A cat cubby and scratching pole $10

A wii game $10

A boxed set of children’s books $20

A pair of girls jeans, never worn $10

This came to a total of $60 after costs.

We also sold a lot of outgrown toys, books, dvds and kitchenware at our market day. This netted a profit after costs of $160.

So the grand total for clearing our clutter and turning it into cash for the month of October is $220.

Market Day!

Last weekend the 3 of us spent 4 hours down in the garage sorting out some items to prepare for the local market day.

We woke early this morning, loaded up the car and headed to market to set up our stall.

It was a suceessful morning. We sold a lot of items, as we had quite low prices. Some people retuned to buy more.

After paying for the stall $25 and $30(ahem, refer Mr techno) for coffees, morning tea and sausage sizzles, we cleared $160.

Barbie girl was great on the market stall, very gentle with the little girls who wanted to buy her preloved toys. And she got to see how happy they were with a new-to-them toy or dvd or book.

So we added $160 to our move to the country Nest Egg.

Camping Update with photos

 

We climbed to the top of Mount Tomaree.

Then we looked over the beach below. If you look very closely at the centre of the photo you will see a black dot. This turned out to be a shark, we think a great white shark. My girlfriend used her super dooper camera telescopic lens to take better pictures and it was actually a shark! People were on the beach not far from there, but nobody was in the water.

See the people on the beach?

Great view! Mr Techno and I keep warm at the top of Mount Tomaree.

Barbie girl likes camping too.

We swam at the beach, we kayaked, lay in the sunshine and buried Barbie Girl in the sand and made her a mermaid tail.

We found a little sand crab.

We had outdoor barbeques at night time with our friends, and toasted marshallows over an open flame.

We had a little wildlife visitor.

We made memories together.

Spontaneous camping update #1

I made a customised 5 page checklist of camping items. I am a very organised person, I like to plan and make sure that everything goes smoothly.

So, with this checklist ( did I mention that it was 5 pages long?) I went thru the checklist with Mr Techno item by item.
Tent, check, hammer, check, groundsheet, gas stove, check, bbq utensils, check. We did this for all 5 pages of items.

We packed the items into the car.

We drove 3 hours.
We unloaded the car at the camping ground.

No tent.

Spontaneous camping

We are driving in the car right now, heading north about 3 hours of Sydney for a spontaneous camping trip.

I found a camping checklist on the internet yesterday, printed it off, packed the car,and we are off for a couple of nights getting back to nature.

Well, we did pack porcelein coffee cups, our coffee machine, and free trade coffee.

And those smiley cookies from the other day.

And the ipad.

But everything else is back to nature….

Cookie baking

Barbie Girl and I love to bake together.

We baked cookies together this week.

Check out the cross eyed grumpy one , top left corner. He was the favourite and Barbie Girl chose to have that one first for afternoon tea.

These cookies were huge. I was anticipating making small delicate bite sized ones, to make around 50 small cookies.

Barbie Girl had other ideas. We put the ball of cookie dough in the fridge for 30 mins to chill. I went off to have a shower, and when I came back down, Barbie Girl had already rolled out the dough and made 13 huge kid sized cookies.

So into the oven they went. We mixed up blue and red icing and tried out the piping set for the first time.

These are a favourite now.

I’m a big Donna Hay fan. Love your work Donna! Below is a recipe we have tweaked from Donna Hay, Modern Classics 2.  However our version bears no physical resemblance to her delicate vanilla snap cookies. Here is the recipe.

Smiley Face Cookies

185 g butter

1 cup caster sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla essence

2 1/2 cups plain flour

1 egg

1 egg yolk extra

1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius

2. Mix butter, sugar and vanilla in mixmaster  or food processor until smooth.

3. Add the flour, egg and egg yolk and mix again to from a smooth dough.

4. Knead the dough lightly, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 mins.

5. Make balls of dough in size you would like and flatten.

6. Place on baking tray on top of silicone baking sheet or baking paper.

7. Bake for 10-12 mins, or a little longer until golden.

8. Cool on wire racks.

9. Pipe on icing or dust with icing sugar.

Enjoy for morning or afternoon tea!

Leaving The City, moving to the country

For some time now,we have been considering leaving city life and moving somewhere in the country.

But where do we want to live? That has been hard to decide.

Firstly, it has to be somewhere where my husband can find employment. Fortunately working in health, he is not dependent on needing to live in the city, so that is good.

I would like to head north of Sydney, as i am a warm/hot weather kind of gal.

I would like to be driving distance to the coast, but not too close.

I would like there to be lots of trees and greenery.

I would like to have some land for chickens, a goat, a dog and a veggie garden.

Mr Techno is originally a country boy, and he is yearning for space after living in our townhouse for 4 years in Sydney.

Barbie girl has a list of all the farm animals that she would like, the actual number of each type of animals as well as their names.

We will probably rent our townhouse out for a year, and rent in the country for a year, just to see how it goes.

Sydney house prices and corresponding mortgages are overwhelming. Longer term, it would be great to have a little house in the countryside for around $500k, about one third of what it would cost for us to buy a house in the area in which we are living about $1.5million.

Where shall we go?