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The Sweet Country Life
I guess for a lot of people, the idea of living in the country is pretty idyllic. That was certainly my thoughts when I was living in the big city and doing the 9 to 5 job, day in, day out. I would daydream of my country kitchen. My days filled with the warmth of a wood fire and making jars of homemade plum jam. My trusty dog by my side and oh the smiles…so many happy smiles
Well it came to ‘crunch’ time living in the city. Rent was becoming really expensive and our family was growing. We either buy a house in the city or we make the move, our very own ‘sea change’. At first we thought a cool little inner city abode would be just lovely. Somewhere close to the groovy cafe’s and the retro furniture stores. But alas our funds could only really afford us to be living way out beyond any kind of civilisation. We would be known as ‘fringe dwellers.’ Now I guess for some people, this would be ok but I’m a kinda all or nothing girl…so we decided to ‘bite the bullet’ and move to the country!
And this gives you an idea of our very first home, which we lived in for a good 2 years or more.
I went through my 2nd pregnancy in the caravan with no hot water, no proper toilet facilities and no tv! Argh!! The whole time we were living in the caravan we were busy building our mudbrick home. We have a gorgeous bush block in country NSW. We are close to the mountains and the beaches are just sublime. I will post up some pics soon of our gorgeous beaches. Anyway, we decided to make all our own mudbricks! Some people looked at us like we were kinda crazy. Especially because we had no experience in what we were doing and it is super heavy work..each mudbrick weighs on average about 20kg. We made them all by hand.
We laid them out on hessian in the sun to dry and would turn them every day so they could dry evenly. It was usually a stinking hot day when we would make ‘muddies’. We designed the house we were building all ourselves also, we wanted to try and keep the costs down and use recycled materials as much as possible. I think we have done pretty well and it just continually evolves. It is now 4 years since we started building and we still havent finished yet! I have decided to share the journey with you all and keep you posted with our story and our progress. By the way, I still don’t have hot running water!
