My Simple Living Story Revisited

This is a post I made on my old blog here. It is linked into Rhonda Jean's blog in her sidebar under Readers Stories, Our simple lives part 1 which is nearly 8 months ago. So I thought it would be nice if I repeated it on my new blog too. Then maybe I could do an update. I know my knowledge of simple living is growing, although probably very slowly. This was prompted by Rhonda's recent post Small Steps.

"Until fairly recently there were no blogs that I read each day. However, now I have about three that I check regularly, and daily I read Down to Earth. Today Rhonda has invited readers to join and and make a post or comment about Simple Living in their homes and lives.

We live in a town of around 1,000 in a remote area. The schools and work are within walking distance, also the girls after school activities.

I can't say hubby's work is not long hours because it is. However, we do live in a very scenic location. We have bought a new house with an eventual view to be mortgage free, but this has had stops & starts. It does mean that we have 3/4 acre to play with at the moment, until we sell one of the houses, though I can't decide at the moment. We have had our new house for nearly 8 months (now 15). We are only just finishing the necessary building work today. Things don't happen with help straight away. Maybe we went about it the wrong way?

We are not big consumers. My big voyage into saving came in 2003. We were living in a rented farmhouse near Melbourne in the bush. We also had our house of three years in a small regional centre in country Victoria that we visited on weekends. Hubby had been working in a factory for two years after restructuring at the IT firm. They eventually closed down. He was working on the floor in the factory and decided to go back to his first career before IT. During his holidays at the factory he did relief work in his first career. This enabled him to get a contract. So on the contract at the farmhouse, he was told it wouldn't be renewed as they didn't have the work for him. I started saving then. Before Christmas he got a permanent job in a remote area. From this saving I was able to show it to the bank. We bought a house, so had two houses. The other one sold during the next Easter.

I dearly wanted my son to go to university. Because we were used to factory wages and had made the adjustment from a very small IT wage to basic wage by adjusting my food spending, we were able to afford the rental home, then the two houses, then to send my son to uni, now the two houses again. We don't usually buy cars that aren't on gas. We did last year though, but we only use it for around town. Would much prefer a gas/LPG car. When hubby left his first career we took an opportunity to buy a car on gas, and that made a huge difference to my life, so did having two cars. Yes, it may be extravagant, but it gives choices. Helps with change management etc.



At hubby's work, he is given things like plums and green tomatoes sometimes and we have put them to good use in making sauce and pickles. I really have been blessed by the kind people at gardenweb (au) and received jam melon seeds and we grew those and made pickles, jam & chutney and have found a lot of our joy simply by growing different kinds of sunflowers. Another great joy is growing swan plants and seeing butterflies come from that. Our community has a craft shop and we are able to buy cheap plants from other people's gardens.



We also have a very inexpensive op-shop here, and know of other good ones. Having been in a town for years with a not so great op-shop I appreciate it. Having said that our bowls pictured on this blog are from that op-shop that did improve at one stage. I never did buy myself a dinner set when I got married, so in 2003 before my saving, I did buy some more in that set on ebay because it was my Nana's design, Johnson Australia if anyone wants to know what it is called. I sometimes see it pictured in magazines.

Since coming to live here we have had to do without Coles. Our shop did away with plastic bags, so I have developed skills in packing boxes in trolleys. I have also decided to cut down my use of bottled pasta and stirfry sauces. I believe living here and doing that has had a great effect on our health. Our shop only could be relied on to stock certain foods consistently so I learnt to cook with sauerkraut for example. However, years on, I have decided to shop out of town. So another set of ingredient recipes had to be sourced. I rely on the Taste magazine for that, though some ingredients are still have to find recipes for, but improving on the web.

If we move, it will be closer to the shop, and also there is an excellent local shop. We have put in berry bushes at our new house, two kinds. I read recently read A Slice of Organic Life. It is very encouraging about what you need to have pigs, ducks & geese.

Some steps we have taken, but haven't gotten any further. We found some bread pans at the tip. The tips is an excellent place here. Recently we bought home some wire netting, just in case. The pans, some of been wire brushed. They were from a bakery. However, the children have been making bread. They have a recipe where you can speed the process up in the microwave, and they make excellent pizzas. They still have the one tube of yeast in the fridge, I am amazed how far it goes.

I love the Spirit of the Bush song, particularly Adam Brands part "she stares at empty cupboards, just like the day before". We did have empty cupboards at the rented farmhouse. But we were never without food. I did very detailed meal plans and shopping. My thoughts if people were having trouble to get very well acquainted with dried beans. They are so cheap! I feel I am not so clever, because in the last year, I have discovered wonderful canned beans and have been enjoying them immensely. I suppose they are cheaper than meat.

I do not like the price of apples just to stew. I have a post about the roadside apples we collected.

What do we do to be self-sufficient? Hubby changes his own oil and fixes bits & pieces on the cars. He cuts our firewood. We use straw or free mulch from the tip, or cut up leaves. We had some hydrid cherry tomato plants, were very disappointed so someone gave us some "real" cherry tomatoes so they could seed down.

I have skills in crochet, knitting and spinning, but don't use them a lot. We saved for a new sewing machine with Castle Hampers. We have a collection of old freezing and preserving books. We have a good herb collection.

We have those new light bulbs in our home. We had to do this, they blew regularly from surges or something.

We don't use a tumble drier."

Living Simply Saturdays resume in the new year.