We have loved living in our home and playing with the idea of putting the house on the market was quite scary. After all the money and energy poured into the property for over 20 years, would it actually be possible to walk away from our dream home. There is a lot of mental chat that takes place when such life changes are considered and it is definitely challenging to contemplate stepping outside of your comfort zone. But our minds were almost made up and we needed to put our thoughts into action.

Estate agents need very little prodding to leap into action and one phone call starts a frenzy of activity that sweeps you along with barely chance to catch your breath, although it took us rather longer than we first thought to untangle ourselves from all the roots that we had put down.

The house was on and off the market for a couple of years while we put other stages of our plan into action. Also, Covid-19 arrived which altered the timing of things a little. However, these delays provided some breathing space to really get used to the idea of such a big change and slowly but surely the doubt and trepidation turned into excitement.

Selling off as many of our possessions as possible certainly helped in the detaching process. We were expecting to feel a bit sad at parting with our belongings but quite the opposite happened. We met some great people and had fun discussing our plans and theirs. We sold cycling equipment to ironmen and competitive mountain bikers, motorbikes to hard core Eastern Europeans riding across the Outback and some climbing equipment to a guy who had just bought his first sailing boat and was about to sail it from Sydney to Adelaide. I think the climbing gear was to get up into the rigging. There is no doubt that these encounters went a long way in confirming that we were making the right decision to shake things up and welcome some new opportunities into our lives.

Eventually, the house sold. We received an offer in February 2021 which we accepted and all of a sudden our future was looking a little different.