Pick it up!

That's right, lesson number one learned.

I was working on my chook yard yesterday, and with my hands full of a 50 metre roll of chicken wire, I caught my foot on some tie wire that I had sitting on the ground next to it. I landed with all my weight (which is substantial...) on my left knee. I thought I had broken something!

The pain was fairly intense, it took me about ten minutes to be able to get up off the ground. And, of course, I had left my mobile phone in the house, so I had no way of calling hubby or a friend to come and help me if I needed it.

My dog was completely unimpressed. He is apparently not the type of dog to alert someone to your injury, stay with you until you can get up, or anything like that. He stuck his nose in my ear, and then took himself off to the dam for a drink and a swim.

So now I have a bung knee and a half-built chook yard, Oh, and I have the 'flu, so I spent most of this afternoon asleep instead of finishing the chook yard. I pick up my chooks tomorrow lunchtime, so guess who is up with the sun in the morning?

From here on in, any tie wire gets hung on something, or put on something, not left on the ground where 'She'll be right, I know where it is', and the mobile phone always, ALWAYS goes in the pocket, particularly when I'm working down the block on my own!

Moving

The big move out to the farm is nearly done. Thank goodness!! I don't want to have to do that again for a VERY long time. We had some great helpers, which made all the difference - without them, we would still be going.

We just have a couple of awkward things to go: the couch, that has to be taken out of the house thru a window, the desk and hutch, the fishtank. The cleaners come to do the house tomorrow, then we can hand it over to the real estate for them to give to our new tenant on Friday. Whew!

Now comes all the fun of sorting out all our stuff. We bought the property as is, which means that we've inherited all the gear in the house and shed, right down to the cutlery and a collection of aluminium teapots. We've got to sort thru all that to see if there is anything that we want to keep, and move what we don't want out into the shed to be sold in a garage sale in a few weeks. I've taken this week off work to do the bulk of it, but I think this is going to keep us busy for a few weeks.

Hello!

About six weeks ago, I called my husband one morning to suggest that we go and look at a display home that was advertised in the local newspaper. He agreed, but didn't sound all that interested. When I asked him about why, he told me it was because he would rather that we design and build our own house, rather than buy something built as a 'spec' home.

I started looking at www.realestate.com.au and made a list of a couple of five acre blocks of land for us to go and have a look at over the weekend. Once we started looking at them, they all seemed like they were way too close to the neighbours, or the block wasn't nice, or it was too full of gullys...nothing really caught our eye. So, it was back to the real estate website.

We expanded our search to larger blocks of land. Because they were a little further out of town, the price for a 10 or 20 acre block wasn't that much more than some of the five acre blocks we had been looking at. The only problem with them was that generally they had no power or water to the block. As we were looking for something that we could move to as soon as possible, this didn't make them very attractive.

Late night reading of the real estate website gave us the perfect solution! A 50 acre block of land with a bore, two dams, a large shed, a 4 bedroom 'house' (really a liveable shed) and most importantly, the power and phone lines already connected to the house.

Although it is much larger than we had originally started looking for, it ticks all the boxes for us. The block is reasonably pretty - it even has a creek running through it - everything is in place for us to move straight in, and the price is about what we would end up paying to be able to move to one of the 20 acre blocks that we had looked at earlier. So, it was off to our favorite real estate agent.

We signed our mortgage documents today, and settlement is on the 24th of August. We have asked for an early possession, so that we can start moving ourselves out there and therefore have our house in town available for rent as soon as possible, but have had no answer from the seller yet. The sooner we have someone in there helping us to pay our mortgage, the happier we will be.

The next 12 days feel like they will take forever! We have so many plans that can't be acted on until we can move in. It feels like we are stuck waiting for the next phase of our life to start! But, those 12 days will be over before we know it, and it will then be full steam ahead into learning how to be even a little bit self sufficient.

This blog is going to be a tracking of our learning curve as we work out how to grow our own veggies, eggs and (gulp!) meat. Hubs is a bit concerned about the fact that he will have known his food personally, but this is something that we are going to have to learn to deal with. There is no point having this much land if we don't   use it to the best of our ability.

So, feel free to stick with us as we figure all this out. It's going to be a heck of a ride!