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This is the 6th and final post in our series on community living. If you missed the others they are here: - Introduction, The Hows, A Kitchen of Chaos – A photo Essay, What’s hard & What we loved

Sweetness:

Conscientious shoppers (or pretending to be)

There is some great kinship in sharing the craziness that is your spouse with another friend. I must admit it was quite a relief when Heidi could cast me a look like this and I would know it wasn’t just me who was concerned for the man I married.

DILF.

Don’t be fooled. Boy child is not being helpful.

What’s worse than going shopping with one whinging toddler who pulls puppy-dog eyes to try and get you to buy them things?

Going shopping with two:

That’s our loot. Mmmm greek yoghurt.

Breastfeeding at checkout: this mama has got skillz.

My husband is The. Best. Ever.

Thank you very much for following our community living experience! Hopefully some of you might have been inspired to give it a go yourself.

Community Living –  Introduction, The Hows, A Kitchen of Chaos – A photo Essay, What’s hard & What we loved

Living with friends has a lot of good going for it. I’ve already talked about the financial benefit of living communally but this was not our main motive (nor in fact the most financially beneficial use of three spare rooms).

So let me share with you about what I loved best:

1)    The company.

I love being with people. There’s probably only one thing I love more – being with people I love. Errol works long hours and I was often finding myself at home going crazy with two small children. Having a second family living with us meant that when the men went of to work Heidi and I were free to watch day time TV and paint each others nails. Ahem. I mean. We had the joy of caring for our little ones together and sharing many a long conversation. Long conversations with another adult GASP – heaven.

In the evenings that I used to spend pining for my husband who works late often I would sit and chat with Heidi while we wasted time worked on our computers. Sometimes we’d do something crafty together and it was altogether quite lovely.

2)    Motivation.

When Heidi and John moved in on the eve of 2011 we all made a commitment to lose weight together. I don’t know about you, but I am terribly unmotivated alone. When Errol goes to work and I am left at home alone with the kids I am rendered unable to say no to that entire lindt chocolate bar that’s beckoning me to eat him. And when I am alone and trying to juggle to wild ones the last thing I feel like doing is setting up the pram, getting hats, sunscreen and snacks and walking to the park. NO thank you. We’ll be driving! Having someone there to keep me strong and provide me some healthy competition was great for me. I lost weight for the first time in my life. Heidi and I joined the gym and it was so fun having someone to work out and gossip with.

Now, weight loss aside, living with other people provided other motivation to. While it may have been tempting to lay in the lounge surrounded by a weeks worth of mess blasting angsty girl rock – the sheer embarrassment of doing so made sure I maintained at least a mild semblance of normal functionality in the day to day. Days that might previously have been spent watching Pocahontas and attempting to fold washing were replaced with adventures to the beach or outings to GoMA.

3)    It’s economical.

Economies of scale people, economies of scale. Making a meal for 2 people (and 2 people pretending to eat the meal but actually just mushing it around the table and then throwing it in your eye) nearly always ends in waste. We share cooking and meals and this meant that with not that many more ingredients than I would have purchased for just our little family – we fed two families.

Our electricity bill went up a bit with the extra people living there – but certainly not doubled. Same with water consumption.

Theo shared his cloth nappies and with only an extra load a week – two little bums were covered in cloth.

There’s probably many more aspects of the economy of community living but I am the sort of person who buys pre-made fruit salads and wonders why 250g of fresh produce is so expensive so I am probably not the right person to ask.

4) It’s fun.

Living with friends is really, really fun. Especially if you pick friends who are, by nature, hilarious. I cannot tell you how many times I near crawled back to my bed in a fit of laughter over something Heidi or John had told me. Or how often we stayed up way later than we should watching goodness knows what and squealing in fear because our alter ego might pop out from behind the couch and scratch our finger nails off (okay, so maybe it was Black Swan).

Of course, it’s not just the adults having fun. Having live-in playmates was kind of awesome. There was always something happening and always someone to play with. It was so sweet to watch the kids interact and learn to play together well.

I know I said this was going to be a five part series but please check in later this week for the 6TH and final post on Community Living // Family Shopping – A photo essay.

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

Scenes in the kitchen – A photo essay

This is a follow-on from yesterdays post: Community living // Introduction

So. Lets talk the practicals of living with another family.

(by the way I love that out of the 8 parties involved in our ‘experiment’ I am the only one giving recount of the affair. Thus my tale can be entirely fabricated and biased. OF COURSE living with ME is AWESOME! )

First up – the obvious aspect of sharing your home and nearly always the first question I’ve been asked.

WHERE DOES EVERYONE  FIT:

I am sure more people would consider living communally if they had the space to allow it. Lots of people were quite curious how we could fit a second family in our home. We had a very standard four bedroom home and conveniently our little family only inhabited one bedroom (with attached ensuite and robe). This left three spare rooms. We did not have dual living spaces but for long term community living this would be ideal. I personally could have lived in this set up long term happily but I know that most people need more personal space than me!

Because I think very visually myself, I’ve made this very rough map of our home for you. Just cos’ I know that’s what I’d want to see if I was reading this post – Plus – I love you guys.

Now… As you can see – there is a reason I am not a draftsman

Room 1 is the master bedroom with attached walk in wardrobe and ensuite. This is where Errol and the babies and I lived.

Room 2 was Scarlet’s – amusingly the only person in the equation with her own room

Room 3 was John & Heidi’s and Willow was in with them.

Room 4 was the ‘spare’ room which John used as his study and Heidi and I used as a dumping ground for the copious piles of washing.

Many a morning Heidi and I would meet here wearing only towels trying to find something from the chaos.

The living room, kitchen and dining we shared equally. Piling two families worth of things into one space. Our cupboards looked like mini chemists:

FINANCES:

I am always curious about what other people are doing with their money (or wondering why the frick we always seem to be running out) so I am going to give you the itty gritty on MULA.

Over our time sharing with friends and family one of the great aspects has been a reduced expenditure. We wanted things with Heidi and John to be simple so split the rent 50/50 ($200 each if you must know!) and our shared weekly grocery shop 50/50 ($100 each).

Errol and I continued to pay the electricity and internet to keep things nice and simple, we didn’t want to risk anything getting messy with money and wanted to make things easy for Heidi and John.

Living alone Errol and I were paying the entire rent + utilities + food which meant our monthly basic living expenses were INSANE (to the tune of $2400!!).

Next up in the series is COMMUNITY LIVING // A KITCHEN OF CHAOS  so please check in tomorrow!