After two and half years we’ve decided that living in the close knit confines of a Retirement village isn’t for us. It’s time to move on….

We’ve done all we can with the small garden. We chose succulents for our front garden. Most of the plants came with us as small cuttings from our last house. From just a small piece poked into the ground, two and half years later it’s grown to be full garden. The rocks have been gathered from various places, and the critters have mainly been gifted to us from family and friends.

All of the rocks and critters will come with us, along with potted cuttings from each plant. I’ll love watching the little cuttings form the basis of a new succulent garden one day.

Our rear courtyard garden was bland walls with brick paving up to the walls when we moved in. It took a while to get this garden right. We ended up with trellis, and mirrors on the wall to create a feeling of space. We started off with fake greenery, but preferred the real thing. Bunnings raised garden beds went in with scented jasmine to ramble around the mirrors. For the adjacent wall we chose clumping bamboo. With miniature strelitzias, tropical greenery, and colourful impatiens we’ve been very happy with result.

The birdbath in the corner of the garden will come with us, as will the Buddha.

Where our own next garden will be is yet to be decided. The real estate market is manic at the moment. No sooner does a house go on the market and it goes under offer almost immediately. We’ve been very fortunate that we’ve found a rental with a periodical lease. We can’t take to long to find somewhere permanent though as the owner expects her circumstances will change in the not to distant future, a change that will allow her to move into the house herself. Once that change occurs I expect we’ll need to be ready to move within 6 – 8 weeks. In the meantime if we find something suitable to buy, we will also be able to give a similar amount of notice to allow time for settlement of our new house. We’re not tied to a lengthy lease.

So, why the move I hear you ask? A few things attracted us to the village two and half years ago. The quality and size of the house is not what one would expect in a retirement house. It’s a spacious house with beautiful hard wood Marri floors. It has a really good sized living area, a king sized master bedroom with a good sized ensuite, a Queen sized guest room also with it’s own ensuite, plus another good sized living room which can be used as a study, craft room, third bedroom, or in our case, a theatre room. This, together with parking for our caravan at our rear gate attracted us, so we thought it was worth giving it a try. (0ur caravan is now long gone).

We did, however, have reservations about living in such a close knit community. Our plan was to keep pretty much to ourselves. Ha! So much for plans. We did start getting involved, and then the problems started. We tried to back track, but that just put us a ‘damned if you do, and damned if you don’t’ situation. It became quite stressful.

I’m sure it’d all have settled down, but once bitten twice shy. We decided to cut our loses and move on sooner rather than later. Fortunately there’s a waiting list for homes in our village so it only took a little over a week for the offers to start coming in.

We will be moving out prior to settlement. It’ll take us a couple of weeks to fully move, then we’ll have to remove all the picture hooks, give everything a fresh coat of paint, and get the carpets cleaned for the new owners.

Over the past two days we’ve taken succulent cuttings and our garden rocks to the rental house, as well as a good bit of shed stuff. The house we’ll be renting has been vacant for a little while now. It’s all been freshly painted, and has had new floor coverings laid. So the house is fresh and lovely. The garden needs some work though. Yesterday paul mowed lawns, and we’ve pruned back roses and creepers and watered some very dried out stag horn ferns. It feels good, really good to have a decent sized garden to get my teeth into. Of course, we won’t be planting a lot in the new garden. But we’ll tidy up what’s there, and will get it all thriving, and we’ll get all our cuttings thriving in pots ready for our own new place – when we find it.

So here we go again, yet another move! Clearly it wont be our last, and quite likely wont even be our second to last. With the current shortage of available homes to buy, getting a house that perfectly suits us would be almost too much to hope for. Fingers are crossed that, even though the perfect home may allude us in this current housing crisis, at least a suitable roof over our head will eventuate before we have to vacate our temporary rental house. Scary eh!