House-sits and Airbnb all organised.

Looking quite tidy and sharp…what you can’t see if the garage crammed with storage containers and the wardrobes jam-packed with junk - Not sure where it’s all going to go.

What can I say, the momentum has continued and things are starting to take shape—the adventure is so close now it’s difficult to contain the excitement. We have not one, but 4 house-sits confirmed, some Airbnb’s booked, and the house sale has gone unconditional! Our short-term plans are all locked in, albeit not quite as we thought we’d plan it, but we now have a good idea of where we’ll be, and when. The planets do line up sometimes, it seems, and things can work out in a way you wouldn’t have thought possible. The house-sit in mid-west New South Wales has been locked in, meaning when we pick up the van and are on our way, we’re heading down south to the cold where we’ll have 7 weeks to stop and get ourselves set up properly.

Our first major problem with this adventure was always how are we going to time settlement of the house and picking up the van whilst we have no firm accommodation arrangements and we’re dragging our belongings around with us. Again, Airbnb was the obvious, albeit expensive, solution. In a stroke of opportunistic luck, however, Alicia has landed an opportunity for another house-sit that, you almost wouldn’t believe it, is set to commence the very day the house settles. We’ve met with the owners in their home, and after chatting for about an hour, they let us know that they’d be really happy for us to house-sit for them. We were expecting that they would likely want to discuss it amongst themselves and let us know in a day or so what their decision was. Instead, we got the gig right then and there. This is an unreal opportunity and means we lock up the house for the last time, drop the keys off to the real estate agent, and head straight to the house-sit, about 50 minutes away. Not only do we have a place to go once the house is sold, Alicia has landed us another house-sit a couple of weeks after the first one, also in a great location, allowing me to continue working. So, there we have it, we have a couple of house-sits organised, reducing the costs of Airbnb’s which have also been booked until the van is ready, and we’ve locked in a direction to head once we’re hooked up to the van and on our way.

In the lead up to our first open home, we’d begun downsizing, either selling, giving away, or throwing out bits and pieces because, a) there’s only so much you can cram and hide in wardrobes (which people will open anyway), and b) because there would be a time when it all just has to go anyway. Well that time is pretty much now, and we’ve realised that we’ve got to pull our fingers out and get cracking. The next few weeks are going to consist of garage sales, trips to the opp shop, and maddening marketplace “conversations”, as we try and move on as much as we can as fast as we can. This leads us to another small problem—we’re still going to need our fridge and, with a toddler, our washing machine up until as close to move out day as possible. We don’t want to put them in storage as we don’t want to be storing stuff indefinitely—that’s just money down the drain, ultimately. We are keeping a few boxes of things with a family member in another state though, so I think we’ll lease some short-term storage, perhaps for 2 months, and we could store the fridge and washing machine in there and sell it from there. We will need a short-term storage solution anyway, as once we’re out we’ll be carting all of our belongings around with us until the van is ready. We have a dual cab 4x4 with a canopy, plus a small hatchback Mazda, so we’ll cart around clothes, a few pantry boxes and so forth, along with anything I’ll need for work, from place to place. And at some point, we’ll need to sell the hatchback which will need to be at the last moment as well because I will need a car for work, so everything that was crammed into 2 cars will then need to fit into one.

I’m not sure how we’re going to manage to pull off downsizing from a large-ish 4-bedroom home, to the point where everything we have and own fits into a Ford ranger and a small storage shed, but we need to make it happen, and we need to get things moving fast. What I do know is, to this point we have been able to find a solution to every hurdle that gets in the way, so I’m confident that, one way or another, we will get to the point where we look back and be amazed by how we managed to pull it off. Until then there’s a lot of figuring out to do, garage sales to be had, and planning to be done.