So... What If We Just Don't Buy Another House?

 For months, we'd been waiting for our lives to settle down.

Sell the Melbourne house.

Buy somewhere in Brisbane.

Move our furniture out of storage.

Get back into a house.

Get back to normal.

That had always been the plan.

Admittedly, the plan had taken a bit of a beating.

Our first buyer had failed to get finance.

Our Brisbane purchase had fallen over with it.

Our furniture had somehow managed to relocate to Queensland without us.

We'd tried auction.

We'd decided to rent the Melbourne house out.

Then, just as we'd given up on selling it...

another offer came in.

This time, we were considerably less excitable.

We'd been here before.

Contracts and offers were lovely.

Money in the bank would be lovelier.

So we waited.

And this time...

It happened.

The house went unconditional.

After everything we'd been through, our Melbourne house was actually going to sell.

Really sell.

No more extensions.

No more waiting for someone's finance.

No more wondering whether the whole thing was going to collapse underneath us again.

We could finally start deciding what came next.

Except something had changed.

Actually, quite a few things had changed.

We already had a home

Somewhere along the way, we'd bought Maximus.

Not because we'd decided to travel Australia.

Not because we'd made some grand decision to sell everything and live on the road.

We bought him because three days of rain at Kalbar had demonstrated fairly convincingly that I was not going to live indefinitely in a 15-foot caravan with Col and two dogs.

😂

We still thought we might buy another house.

Maximus was simply going to make life a hell of a lot more comfortable while we worked out where that house might be.

And he did.

For the first time in months, all our clothes weren't living in boxes in Shaun.

We had storage.

We had room.

We had a proper bathroom.

We had space for Wal and Cheech.

We could actually live in this thing.

And that quietly changed the equation.

We didn't need to rush.

Meanwhile, Col was having a shit time at work

The job that had originally brought us to Brisbane wasn't turning out the way we'd expected.

In fact, things were going steadily downhill.

By this stage, Col's boss had even acquired a nickname.

Cruella.

Which probably tells you most of what you need to know about how well things were going.

😂

Col wasn't happy.

And we'd started talking more and more about what he was going to do.

For most of our adult lives, work had dictated where we needed to be.

I'd spent 20 years working in justice.

Col had spent 33.

I'd already finished my career.

Col had left justice and moved into this new role.

That role was the whole reason we'd chosen Brisbane in the first place.

But now the house had sold.

We had Maximus.

And the job that had brought us here was making Col miserable.

So the conversation started to change.

What exactly were we rushing for?

We could buy another house.

That would have been the obvious next step.

Find somewhere around Brisbane.

Move our furniture out of storage.

Set everything up again.

Col could keep working.

We could go back to having an address.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with that option.

But for the first time, it wasn't our only option.

We'd spent months living differently.

Not always successfully.

😂

We'd moved around.

Met some bloody lovely people.

Stayed in some beautiful places.

Solved problems we didn't know we could solve.

I'd learnt to hitch Loki myself.

I'd fixed a screen door.

I'd operated my own beach-cart water delivery service.

We'd survived electrical failures, chunky milk, bird-sized mosquitoes, the consequences of two-stroke fuel in a generator and a compulsory outdoor shower with a tarp for a door.

And somehow...

we were okay.

More than okay, really.

We were starting to enjoy not knowing exactly what came next.

Then we started doing the maths

The Melbourne house was sold.

Once everything settled, we'd have a decent amount of money behind us.

We already owned Shaun.

We'd just bought Maximus.

And instead of immediately putting all that money back into another house...

what if we didn't?

What if we put it somewhere safe for a while?

What if Col left the job?

What if we gave ourselves some time?

Not forever.

We weren't declaring that we'd never own another house.

We weren't selling everything, throwing away the map and disappearing into the outback.

We simply didn't have to decide yet.

For the first time in decades, we could actually stop.

And see what happened.

So we made the decision

Col would leave work.

We wouldn't buy another house.

Not yet, anyway.

We'd put the money from the sale away.

We'd live in Maximus.

And we'd travel for a couple of years.

No enormous itinerary.

No list of 400 places that had to be ticked off.

No racing around Australia just so we could say we'd done it.

We'd take our time.

If we liked somewhere, we'd stay.

If we didn't, we'd move on.

We could visit family.

Find good camps.

Meet people.

Let Wal and Cheech explore Australia one sniff at a time.

And work out the rest later.

When we told the family, there wasn't exactly a stunned silence.

They knew what Col had been going through at work.

Nobody seemed particularly surprised.

Mostly, they were just happy for him.

And really, the decision hadn't come out of nowhere.

It had been building for a while.

The difference was that now, with the Melbourne house finally sold and Maximus sitting outside...

we actually had the freedom to do something about it.

This really wasn't in the plan

When we left Victoria on 1 February, we weren't setting off on some great Australian caravan adventure.

We were moving to Brisbane.

That was it.

The caravan was just how we were getting there.

We thought we'd sell one house and buy another.

Instead, the first sale collapsed.

Our furniture ended up in the wrong state.

We lived in Loki.

I cracked it in the rain.

We accidentally bought Maximus after going to a caravan show “just to look.”

And now, somehow...

we didn't have a house at all.

And we weren't looking for one.

For the first time, there was no next address waiting for us.

Just Shaun.

Maximus.

Wal.

Cheech.

Col and me.

And wherever we felt like going next.

It wasn't what we'd planned.

Not even close.

But maybe that was the best part.

There was just one thing

Before we properly hit the road, there was something we needed to know.

We'd bought a much bigger caravan.

We had a big Ram to tow it.

We were about to spend a couple of years travelling with this setup.

And neither of us wanted to simply assume everything was okay.

We wanted to know we were safe.

So we decided to get Shaun and Maximus professionally weighed.

Very responsible.

Very sensible.

Probably one of the smartest decisions we'd made since leaving Victoria.

What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, as it turned out.