Then, a few years ago, we realised we have never been minimalists. We like lots of stuff around us. We like the idea of living in a cottage even though our home is no cottage sadly, a modernish 1970s bungalow.
If we lived in England, a place we fell in love with years ago, we would be living in one of those pretty little chocolate-box villages in a thatched cottage built generations ago but modernised a wee bit. Mind you, thatch is not cheap and has to be replaced. That’s another article though.
We also realised that the love shack is actually shrinking. One of the larger bedrooms has become Jen’s quilting studio.
Another takes the overflow from the studio and is a storage area for book collections and my model car collection, as well as those few items of furniture we no longer have a use for but are too emotionally attached to.
Items we would never even consider disposing of.
The TV room is where I now sit and churn out thousands of words, for various reasons, is now called my office for when the accountant and taxman calls. We only need one TV nowadays and that’s in the lounge.
When the kids call they often mention our stuff with an eye to the future, having to, sadly, one day clear the place out when the last parent moves on.
We just laugh, their problem, not ours. We like our stuff around us. It is comforting, all my books and all Jen’s quilting stuff. Some art.
Trinkets, bric-a-brac, memories. We have beautiful quilts on the walls all around the place.
The internal garage still has all our bikes from our cycling days hanging on the walls, treasures that we will never part with, memories of great times riding the greats cycle rides in New Zealand.
We talked about donating them to charity a while ago but that will never happen. They are now treasures to us.
So we are now down to two bedrooms. That’s fine.
This is a natural progression for many families. At some stage the family home is found.
Maybe not the first or second home, but eventually the one the kids will call home and come back to all our lives, bringing grandchildren with them.
Grandchildren will forever know that house was where many of their memories started. Where family values were recognised as passed down to their parents.
The home will be the one the parents say is the one, that’s it, no more moving. We have everything we need and we can improve on things as we need to. We like the neighbours and the neighbourhood, we feel safe and our children will be safe.
In time, children grow and leave. The family home becomes not only the extended family base but the home for retired parents enjoying their golden years after decades of raising children, hard work, worry, financial burdens, careers, study and family life.
We walk into all our rooms; we have memories of family stuff in each room, good memories. Reading to children, playing with toys with them, sitting with them when they were unwell.
We remember the fish and chips meals on the lounge floor on a Friday or Saturday night in front of the old TV.
Our darling teenagers reluctantly doing dishes in the kitchen, bemoaning dramatically the unfairness of it all and not even being paid to do it. The laughter, even the tears at times.
We have been here so long our neighbourhood, still quite rural, has become much larger, many people building beautiful homes nearby on large sections. Despite all this talk of intensive housing, that is not a goer where we live.
Our old home will be ours forever. I seriously do not like shifting, never have.
We did it too many times when we were younger, chasing dreams. No more. The day we moved in I said to Jen: “This is it, we’re not shifting again”. She readily agreed. I then put Supertramp on the stereo and wound it up. We are here and here to stay.
