Reply To: Let’s all say HI to kick off the New Year!

[HannahLevi]

Hi Wretha, thank you for the kind welcome.

Your sky castle looks incredible, what an amazing thing you have created. If I could build something half as good as that, I’d be over joyed :)

The ‘static’ I mentioned is a static caravan, the ones with a thin timber frame covered in aluminum. Our is around 12ft x 40ft, so it’s a good size but it’s not very pretty on the eyes. We’re hoping by next year to have built a wooden home but to keep the static and use it as a studio space and maybe get some climber plants and let them grow up around it.

I’m not sure what to write about our lives….. but here goes. We spent last year living and working with some friends who ran a guest house in Cumbria, uk. It is a beautiful part of this country and we were very lucky to get the chance to live in such an unspoilt area and to be so close to a lake (Buttermere, if you happened to want to take a little peak online) I’ve been staying here on the farm on and off for a few years, I made myself a little base here, but I was traveling around the UK alot whilst working in different places. My partner moved her permanently at the end of last year, and it has been utter bliss.

We have been spending some time recently figuring out what we would like to do. Neither of us have ever been money or career focused,  so we are trying to work out how exactly we can escape the rat race and live more freely. I’m really crafty, so I’m currently working on a couple of things to see if they attract any interest and then hopefully make a small steady income from making things. I’d mainly be focusing on reclaiming old unwanted furniture and giving them new leases of life. I also love taking a bunch of odd unwanted things and making them into something interesting. I’m into photography too, and I’ve recently started getting bookings for weddings and christenings, so that will be bring in an income too and I’m hoping to sell some of my prints. In short, we’re trying to avoid spending our time working for someone to make money, to live a  life that is predominantly spent at work.

We spend alot of our time being creative and when we are not, we can be found reading or watching a film. Ideally, we want to live in this beautiful place, without having to leave it every day, to drive to a job we don’t want to have, to then return home, eat, sleep and repeat the process the next day. Fingers crossed, we can make enough to live on and spend more time doing things we enjoy. I’ve always enjoyed the outdoors and felt I’ve use electricity and water in a careless, almost wasteful manor. I’d like to be more considerate to what I actually need and feel going off-grid would achieve this. I’ve always wanted to spend a few months living in the woods, going right back to basics and experiencing what I can do without relying on electricity  but then thought why not do that here with the space we’ve already got.

I’m really excited to see what we can achieve, we just need to work out how to do it, there seem to be lots of options, we just need to find ones that will work here and which are the most cost effective :)