Moving house and parting waters

Oh yes, we disappeared again! Littletree and I have been a little exceedingly busy moving house. In a flood.

Surprise! We have a new home. It’s still in Fern Gully, but on the far side of the caldera.

The new house is gorgeous – it’s like our dream home. We have a large block of land in the bush, rainforest, dozens of fruit trees (mangoes, guavas, rose apples, pomegranates, bananas, papayas, pears, sapotes, and loads more!), established, fenced veggie gardens, a large creek with swimming holes and stretches we can kayak on, and a small, freshwater spring that cascades down little waterfalls in the rainforest – clean sweet water we can drink!

And the house itself is so perfect for us!

The front of the house

The kitchen (all wooden – yay!)

My bedroom,

with extra awesome rainbow window

And my own little balcony to enjoy the morning sun

And a sunroom off my bedroom, that shall be my office :)

Littletree’s room

The most enormous covered deck ever!

Adorable fireplace in the funky living room

Veggie gardens

The gorgeous rainforest…

It’s honestly the most amazing place ever. I go to sleep at night hearing the burbling of the spring below my window, which cascades from one pool to the next…

The only problem is that since Cyclone Oswald, which hit us the day after I got this new house, it’s been raining heavily, and flooded here. The creek has been up over the driveway and we’ve been unable to drive in for a whole month!

At some point, it even got up to waist-deep over the causeway, with a very strong current – at that level, I didn’t even try to cross, having decided that anything over knee-deep was unsafe (and even then it was a bit iffy), and it was deemed only safe for Littletree to wade through if it was no more than halfway up her shins. Definitely not possible to drive poor Sunshine (our van) through!

So, not being able to drive in, we couldn’t move in properly – we managed to get some camp mattresses and bedding up to the house in backpacks, wading through the creek (when it was low enough to do so), and then schlepping up about 200 metres of muddy, rocky hill to get to the house.

We had a good friend come to stay who helped out a lot – she even lugged a little bar fridge through the creek and up the hill for us!

And I did about 57 trips back and forth, down to the van, fill up storage bins and a backpack with stuff, wade through the creek, put storage bins on a cart, and lug the lot up to the house, unload, return with empty bins, rinse and repeat.

We still don’t have furniture at the house, or a proper fridge, but we have what we need, and slowly, one box at a time, I’m getting stuff in. And in the meanwhile, I’m getting a LOT of exercise.

WELCOME HOME!

The housewarming party is yet to come :)