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Shedders
This is a true account of how six friends in our fifties and sixties confronted the process of growing old. Retirement was looming and none of us wanted the normal pathways to isolation and an affordable flat with a spouse and a television, a gated retirement community, or a granny flat with the relatives. Studies showed that people who are active, engaged, and keep learning live longer, contribute more and feel more fulfilled. We wanted that.
Over several years, we created a vision of living together in a small community of trusted friends. We would watch more diverse movies, cook more exciting food and solve more challenging problems, as well as always having someone to mind the house and feed the dog. By pooling our resources we could stretch our finances twice as far.
It was audacious, idealistic and uncharted. Whatever made us think we could carry it off?
Indeed there were many struggles over the following seven years. This story tells how we aligned our vision, searched for and found a location and came to grips with the finances. We got to know each other – and ourselves – far better, at times, than we ever wanted. We dealt with the failure of the universe to serve us up exactly what we wanted. We handled our cold feet and hot tempers. We learned to shape and re-shape the vision.
Finally, against all odds, we moved into a fabulous home we had designed and built on a four-acre block in a truly beautiful part of the world.
This is the story of how we did it and what the journey was like – the dragons that had to be slain along the way, what we learned, and what had the project nearly fall over a number of times.
And mostly, what we had to SHED to get hard-wired habits, unrealised yearnings, judgements, misunderstandings and superfluous belongings.
Over several years, we created a vision of living together in a small community of trusted friends. We would watch more diverse movies, cook more exciting food and solve more challenging problems, as well as always having someone to mind the house and feed the dog. By pooling our resources we could stretch our finances twice as far.
It was audacious, idealistic and uncharted. Whatever made us think we could carry it off?
Indeed there were many struggles over the following seven years. This story tells how we aligned our vision, searched for and found a location and came to grips with the finances. We got to know each other – and ourselves – far better, at times, than we ever wanted. We dealt with the failure of the universe to serve us up exactly what we wanted. We handled our cold feet and hot tempers. We learned to shape and re-shape the vision.
Finally, against all odds, we moved into a fabulous home we had designed and built on a four-acre block in a truly beautiful part of the world.
This is the story of how we did it and what the journey was like – the dragons that had to be slain along the way, what we learned, and what had the project nearly fall over a number of times.
And mostly, what we had to SHED to get hard-wired habits, unrealised yearnings, judgements, misunderstandings and superfluous belongings.
307 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 18, 2013
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December 20, 2023
Interesting true life story of a group of couples embarking on a shared life together.
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