Two challenging years have passed. A lot has happened over this time – COVID-19, purchasing a house and moving, and then emptying a family property. There’s been no time or energy to blog (or anything really creative) and I’ve learned some hard lessons out of it – perhaps these will be of use to you.
Buying a property during the pandemic was the worst timing imaginable. Property prices in regional Australia went up like a rocket and the scarcity of available homes in our chosen area was a terrible combination. Banking had changed too – no longer could you purchase with a 10% deposit (or 0% like three years ago) and without available funds, well let’s just say the banks weren’t very nice to deal with. In retrospect it would have made more sense to offload investment properties to fund our primary place of residence but I made the mistake of trying to hang on to them – while future planning is all well and good, immediate living needs were the priority. I held out though and this made life much harder than it needed to be. So this lesson is – sort out home first, worry about future investments later.
Cleaning out a family property is always very hard – particularly after 20 plus years of habitation. The difficulty of lockdown prevented us from organising help from other family members. The great news was – friends came to our rescue. The lesson from this was – ask for help because it comes from the most surprising directions at times. I’m very grateful to our friends who turned up to help and the hours they put in with the cleaning, packing and moving of so much stuff.
The final part of the puzzle has been looking after each other and learning to take time to rest and recharge. We ran really hard for months, without really stopping to take time out. It was months after moving that we finally stopped to enjoy the house and re-group. It was hard on our energy levels and relationships. The final lesson is to take that time out. Some things are so important and we take them for granted. It’s been a rough run, and these things take time to improve.
Now we’ve had some time off without huge amounts of pressure on us and things are getting much better. I haven’t had the spare brain power to blog, let alone be creative in other ways. After a nice break out in the country and spending some quality time at home I finally feel like things are getting back on track. The new strains of COVID are pushing everything a bit, and people are reacting as people do – self-interest leading the way (toilet roll hoarding – what the?). Living with new variants doesn’t seem to be as hard as living with the ever changing restrictions and as a result we’ve adopted a more insular lifestyle – tighter groups of friends and more focused activities with them. It’s a nice change really and maintaining these relationships has become more purposeful and I feel like this has given more depth to those relationships.
It’s good to feel like I have enough go to start writing again. I look forward to pushing out more posts (some will be of varying usefulness 🙂 ) Stay safe!
Photo by Ian Turnell from Pexels
Angus' Blog 