This week sees our early retirement house move plans accelerate significantly as we hurtle towards our completion date early next week. In this weeks blog we look at the challenges of packing up the family home of 22 years, managing a house move independently with only ourselves and a hire van to get things done and our procrastination about a potential YouTube venture that we just need to get going.
Final arrangements for the house move.
Monday was a bit of a mental day, as our moving plans suddenly started to accelerate from seemingly nowhere. We were on our way to Yorkshire to see Mum when we had conformation from our estate agents that everything was go for a completion on 9 Aug- in 8 days time! Our buyers had finally had confirmation from their lender that everything was in place. We never really wanted to tempt fate by booking things for the move until we had received this confirmation, but that has left us with a lot to do in not very much time.
Within a couple of hours, we had booked a van, inspected and booked a storage facility in Skipton- close to our eventual home and spoken with our solicitors to try and fire up our house purchase for the next couple of months. After a brilliant day with Mum, complete with a legendary Yorkshire fish and chip tea, we then found ourselves in Ikea late at night searching for packing boxes for the move. At the point of writing this, we are just steeling ourselves for a good 3-4 days of crazy packing, paperwork chasing and good old lifting ’n shifting!
Feelings about the move
It was only a few hours before we moved when we were lying in bed, that it really hit home that we were going to be leaving the house for good in only a few days time. Our last night in the house with our possessions almost crept up on us and caught us unawares- not that we didn’t know it was coming, but the reality of it finally hit home.
We have never felt particularly emotionally attached to the house in our 22 years living here, but inevitably the house does hold a host of memories for us all. It is where our family grew up, it was home to so many milestone celebrations over the years and was also home to some of our sadder moments in life as well. There is an unexpected tinge of sadness at moving on and leaving the house and the memories behind, but we have a new chapter of life to write- with new adventures to have and memories to build.
We know that the next chapter for the house will be an exciting one, as a new family have the opportunity to build their own memories as their children grow up in their new family home. Exciting times all round.
House move update- Sunday
I sit here in the house on Sunday morning and it looks a little chaotic. After a busy few days, we have very little left in the house and only have the final cleaning and bits n bobs to sort out before we hopefully complete on Tuesday when we officially become homeless!
We manage to squeeze most of our worldly possessions into a storage facility in Yorkshire via 2 trips in a hire van on Friday and Saturday. As well as being hard physical work, it was also a brilliant example of real life Tetris- fitting blocks of stuff into a space that at first seemed so roomy! The storage move combined with numerous visits to the local tip and charity shops to get rid off our surplus stuff has pretty much got most things sorted. Thank goodness we had been on a minimalist mission for the last few months- otherwise the move would have been impossible in such a short space of time. We still feel like we have moved things that we still may choose to discard in the future, but it is a lot better than it could have been.
Our less is more philosophy has certainly paid off- but an interesting thing has happened- the more we have discarded, the more we have realised we have yet to go. It is an interesting inverse of Parkinson’s law, where the less we have, the less we actually want. When will this feeling come to a natural conclusion? We are not sure, but we are enjoying the freedom and the space that the process is providing.
Sunday dinner at the kids house
We had a lovely surprise role reversal last Sunday when Luke and Charlotte invited us to their new house for Sunday dinner. The positive luxury of arriving to a fully cooked Sunday dinner was such a joy (great cooking Luke- the slow roast lamb was spectacular!).
When we took time to think about it, when our kids were at home and our house was so busy with people going in all different directions throughout the week- Sunday dinner was one of the consistent rituals in our family life. At the time, the kids hated it- “not another roast dinner”, but it was our time as a family to slow down, spend quality time together and reflect on what we had done, and what we were planning on doing in the future. It is so lovely that the kids now recognise in their own lives the joy of doing just that in their own homes.
We had such a lovely time with Luke, Charlotte and her family. The chance to catch up, share memories and our dreams of the future over the dinner table was a welcome return to this routine. We are now just waiting for our next invite!
YouTube preparations and procrastinations
We have toyed for a long time with documenting our journey into early retirement via YouTube, but have always found a convenient reason not to do it. At the root of this procrastination is probably just simple fear! We both hate being on camera- or specifically hearing ourselves on camera. If we could do YouTube without having to watch or edit ourselves on screen, I am sure it would be a much easier process- but it’s not! I have the fear of my incompetence in editing videos- I hate being rubbish at something- and particularly being exposed as being rubbish in public! I love my photography, but have worked really hard in the background to ensure that the work that I put out is of an acceptable standard. If we commit to a YouTube project- there would be no such luxury of building the videography skills and the confidence in private- it will all be very public.
Another one of our fears is associated with our perception of many YouTubers- self obsessed, narcissistic egomaniacs- something that we don’t really aspire to be…ever! Similarly, most creators are young- there are not many channels produced by people of our age. You can see how the excuses so easily build up. How can we so easily make a decision to quit our jobs, move house to the mountains and retire early, and yet look for every possible excuse not to do something so simple?
A number of close friends have said that we should do it as we have a story to tell and a journey to go on as part of our early retirement that lots of people would be interested in. This is encouraging, but we still have all the excuses in the world to not do it right now. The biggest excuse of being teachers, has just disappeared and we have the ideal opportunity of packing up the house as a natural starting point for the whole project. We just need to put our big boys and girls pants on, suck it up and get a first video out there…that we know in reality no one will ever probably see, but the prospect is so scary!
So that’s it for another week on our journey to early retirement. Hopefully by next week we should be officially homeless, but in a position to move positively forward with our house purchase and renovation project. In other news, we may be coping with a week of dog sitting next week, but more of that later!
Have a brilliant week and enjoy the sunshine,
Richard & Jackie.
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