Community Living // What’s Hard.

This is the forth part in a series – Check out the other posts in our Community Living Series - Introduction, The Hows & A Kitchen of Chaos – A photo Essay

WHAT’S HARD:

Sharing your home with another family isn’t always going to be smooth sailing and our experiment was met with lots of curiosity about whether things were ‘still working out’ as if everyone was waiting for us to decide living communally was horrid and we couldn’t wait for our friends to leave. That wasn’t the case but let’s talk about things that you might consider before sharing your home.

1) The children.

While we were all prepped for our friends to move in and excited for the change; our two toddlers found the change quite challenging. Scarlet especially (having been uprooted from her lovely home) took some time to settle in. It didn’t help that her wonderful toys were now in a shared play room and being touched and taken by my two. The first month was a near constant mess of both our little girls in tantrums. There was a point where I considered shipping them both off to Russia but thankfully they settled about a month in and kept their screaming matches of ‘ITS MINE’ to a minimum. As mentioned previously Peach and Scarlet are now very good friends.

2) Sound

8 people in one home is quite a handful. Especially considering when 4 of them have no regard for anyone else or their noise levels.

Sometimes poor Heidi would wake thinking she could hear one of her little ones and realise it was one of ours. Sometimes I would wake and hear Scarlet (who’s bedroom was next to ours) having a lovely long conversation in her sleep (or yelling NO I WON’T GO TO SLEEP).

Annnd. Lets be honest; it’s not just the babies making noises at night…ifyouknowhatImean…. Or at least, we had to be very quiet. Because yes, the walls aren’t that thick and you can’t go to town with the lovemaking when you’re sharing your home (unlike some of our previous houseguests *cough, cough*).

3) When sea frog meets city frog / Messy VS Clean.

I am not secretive about the fact that I am a messy person. I do try not to be. Or at least – I try to try not to be but the point of the matter is that I can think of 100 ways in which I’d rather spend my time than tidying.

Heidi my dearest is not exactly that way inclined. When I say that I mean that she is in fact, rather inclined in the opposite way. She is quick to start cleaning, organizing, tidying. Her home has always been immaculate. I did warn her before she moved in with us that we were messy people and I like to think I was mildly better at tidying while she lived with us but the truth is I am sure it was very hard for her. In fact, I think she had to let a lot of her personal preferences go and I know how hard that is.

This could be a deal breaker for communal living so if it was a long term thing, you’d want to consider hunting for friends with similar housekeeping ideals. All that being said, living with clean Heidi was GREAT for me Bahahaha

4) When 8 becomes 11 / Unexpected houseguests

Long before we invited Heidi and John to live with us I had invited my old school friend Aaron to stay in our home on his arrival to Brisbane. He was moving from interstate and I had offered him the use of our spare room while he settled into town and found himself somewhere to live near Uni. When Heidi and John moved in it suddenly dawned on me that we now didn’t really have a ‘spare’ room. While Errol and I would have happily hosted our friend Aaron for weeks while he searched for a place, it wasn’t just our space anymore and that was hard. Now, if 9 people in a home wasn’t crowded enough Aaron’s arrival in Queensland coincided with our friends Jess and Dana arriving home from their travels and asking to stay with us for ‘a few nights’. These were our best friends and they were homeless (having packed up their home before their trip to move interstate) and we loved them dearly. Of course we let them stay and they slept on the floor in our room. Buuut, our dear friends weren’t actually sure what the heck they were doing and what was initially a few nights rolled into TWO WEEKS (and Dana stayed nearly a month!)

Yes, poor Heidi and John. Signing up to live with one family and signing up to live with them and all their homeless friends is something else. I felt terrible about this situation. I didn’t want to impose on John and Heidi and I didn’t want to leave our friends without somewhere to stay. My advice in this situation is to not have any other friends. Problem solved

Now that I’ve got the hard things out of the way, please check in soon to read about all the delights of living communally in COMMUNITY LIVING // WHAT WE LOVED