Sometimes its good to take a step back and ask yourself "whats going on here?". Yes I live on a smallholding and I write web articles to share with readers the things we've learned ... how to grow your own vegetables, or how to tell if a goat is pregnant, and what our air dried ham tasted like. But what exactly are we doing all this for? Why did we move from UK city jobs to a Leitrim farmhouse in Ireland?
Turn back the clock eight years, my husband and I felt a lack of fulfilment in our jobs. There was something missing, something we couldn't quite put our finger on. Things didn't sit quite right. Seeing hunger on television from around the planet, seeing degradation of rain forests and other ecological gems to fuel the materialistic cravings of the 'west', watching the impact of global warming ... being part of the 'overdeveloped world' ate at my conscience. Apart from going to impacted places and being eco-warriers, or volunteering with aid organisations like VSO what could we do from home to make changes? I felt a bit uncomfortable in the role I was leading but solutions seems beyond reach.
Previous to my working life, during my Environmental Science degree, my eyes were opened to cause and effect on a global and local scale. It took a few years before I experienced a shift in my own thought patterns from 'I want that outfit I saw in the sales' to 'do I actually need that outfit? Who made it? Where did it come from? Will having it really make me happy?!'. I knew the answers to all those questions, yet still I carried on.
At the same time I was toying with the idea that I'd love to work a four day week, but thought I couldn't afford it. I wanted to work less so that I could do more 'enjoyable' activities in my time off, creative things like baking, gardening, crafting. I knew I'd find that fulfilling, and wondered if that was the missing part of my life.
So instead of just daydreaming about an unobtainable lifestyle I began to wonder just how much money I could save by changing my habits from 'have to have that Chanel nail varnish' to 'if I live simply, if I look at where my main expenses are and try to reduce them, then perhaps I can work part-time, or even eventually give up work and try to earn money from doing the creative things I want to do during my time off'.
At the same time I realised that this type of lifestyle would tie in with having a minimum impact on the environment and that dawning fuelled my enthusiasm all the more. It meant I would radically reduce my contribution via consumerism to negative impact. .. the need to cut down rainforests on the other side of the planet for timber trades and agriculture, also the amount of fossil fuels burned to create the things I don't actually need would be effectively eradicated by this change in lifestyle. My carbon footprint would shrink and I'd then stop taking my unfair share across a whole range of spectrums.
Once my mindset had tuned in to change I began taking small steps towards, well, we weren't quite sure exactly where it would all lead us, but one day I opened up an Excel spreadsheet (at work!) and began to enter every penny I spent every day for a year. My aim was to get from a five day to a four day working week by reducing my habitual materialistic attitude to life, but it didn't take long to see that simple steps would get me down to a very attractive three day working week by doing simple things like making my own lunch rather than buying it at work or looking for clothes in charity shops so my wardrobe consisted of some reused items. I made a lot of changes like this, right down to using the same tea bag twice! In the end taking in two lodgers meant I could give up work altogether, pay the mortgage and go back to college to start an Art Degree. We started to see what life had to offer by spending less and being more creative. Around this time my relationship with Dan became more permanent, and soon after our first pregnancy came and we began to reevaluate our joint lives and step up the pace.
Dan wanted to give up going out to work too as being a teacher he would leave the house at 7am, get home at 7pm and spend the weekends working at home. Instead he wanted to find something he could do from home, so that he could share the privilege of watching our children grow. We looked into moving to the UK countryside where he thought he would like to be a carpenter and I could teach felting workshops, but cost of UK rural housing meant we would both have to work in the city full time, commute and pay for childcare which to us, was pointless. We searched worldwide on the internet for cheaper land and houses ... New Zealand looked very appealing, but too far from loved ones, southern Spain looked affordable too, but too hot and sunny for our fair skins, then of course we considered my homeland Ireland.
With the sale of our house in the UK we covered the cost of our Irish farmhouse and wiped out our mortgage. Our biggest expense was now our food, household heating and car fuel bills. Within two years we were producing almost all of our own meat and vegetables. We installed a solar panel to heat our water in the summer months. We chose a simple low tech wood burning stove with a back boiler which heats the house and water in winter, using wood grown on our land. Getting away from oil central heating alone has saved us a couple of thousand a year in heating bills. Now our main expense is diesel car fuel.
Living in the city its still very possible to do this, you don't have
to end up on a smallholding like we did if its not your thing. Start
taking the steps just like this inspiring lady at 'Living the Simple Life I Want'.
She is living as sustainably as possible in Dublin and at the same time
wiping out her debt. She has left the consumer trap and tells us about
her ideas and experiences.
I suppose in terms of most peoples income we are a poor family, peasants who are self sufficient(ish). We strive to spend as little cash as possible. Sometimes it hits home how cash poor we actually are when somebody says something like 'why don't you get satellite tv, its only €30 a month', and I'm totally shocked because thats a quarter of our monthly living budget and a huge wad of cash in our terms! We have to budget carefully for Christmas and Birthdays.
On the up side we don't have a mortgage, we don't have to pay for childcare (in Ireland that is often equal to or greater than a mortgage and is now referred to here as 'the 2nd mortgage'), we don't have to commute to work. When the sun shines we can play, within reason. Dan has a craft business that skips along at a very enjoyable rate, he loves the work and never wants it to become a production line, when he has enough orders in for hobby horses he closes his order book. I love writing and have even been paid recently to write a felting tutorial for a magazine, I also give felting workshops once a month around our farmhouse table. So work is at a very low key and enjoyable level.
Our impact on the environment is now minimal. We are continuously working at ''closing the loop" of our consumption. We grow the majority of our own food, any food waste is composted and put back into the vegetable patch, we hope to incorporate a compost toilet into our lives in the near future so thats another loop closed. Of course we have the family car, but I do make an effort to minimise its use and try to lift share as much as possible.
The part of this life we love and cherish the most are the parts which money can't buy (which is lucky!), which we don't pay for ... time together as a family, enjoyment of food from seed to fantastic family mealtimes, time with family friends, creativity, a feeling of freedom, an appreciation of nature - the seasons - how we fit in with that and synchronise with it. Its refreshing, sustaining, fulfilling. I'd be lying if I said life is a continual state of bliss, of course we have our ups and downs, but so far so good, and fundamentally we feel happy and fulfilled.
We hope to continue this lifestyle for as long as our health allows us to. Health is wealth and we are looking forward to many years in this lovely healing home.
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