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So, I promised you more about community living some months ago and I’ve finally got my act together to tell you all about it. And since I’ve made you wait so terribly long, I am going to be thorough and split this into FIVE posts (this being the first).

COMMUNITY LIVING // ON NOT WANTING TO BE ALONE

Errol and I have been begging any and all our friends to live with us in community since as long as we can remember. Partially because living communally reduces expenses but primarily because we’re social beings.

Nearly everyone talks about how lovely it is to have ‘their own space’ and be ‘alone’ together as a couple. I feel mildly concerned that Errol and I do not share this same desire. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love being alone with my sweet but I also think living alone as single nuclear family is just about as silly as ideas come. I don’t mean to say that I think people who choose to live like this are silly, just that I think societies ideal of entire households supporting 2, 3, 4 or so people is very counterintuitive. I’ve spoken about the longing to live in community here before.

Truth be told, Errol and I have been living in some form of community for years.

Our experience with community living began a month after we wed and we rented our spare room to a girl named Naomi. She definitely sold us on living with friends being the finest housemate a young married couple could have asked for. She was quiet and pleasant and we loved her very much.

The week following Peach’s birth we moved into our Bus on my parents property. We lived there for a year and were lucky to live so close to my parents for my first year of motherhood. My parents probably wouldn’t have survived us living WITH them but the arrangement of us in our bus and them in their house worked out quite nicely.

Next, we moved back to Brisbane and rented a four bedroom home. We hosted a Chinese student, Dwight and were very happy to have his smiling face around the house.

Yes, we’ve been living communally for some time now.

And, remarkably – it’s all gone very well (Well… except for this one time where we advertised a spare room for free rent in return for household help and… lets just say it didn’t end well)

During December we invited our friends Heidi & John and their daughters Willow and Scarlet to live with us until they found a suitable place to rent in Brisbane. We’d known Heidi and John for about two years, had always got along really well with them and we’re 98% sure they weren’t axe murderers.  So didn’t hesitate to invite them to share our home. We had three spare rooms and one lonely housewife mooching around the house all day long wishing for someone to chat with. And thus began our community living experiment. Two families sharing one home for three months.

Many of you expressed interest in our community living experiment so please follow this series to learn more about our experience with it. Hopefully it can give some of you a better idea of whether its something for you (or not!).

Check in tomorrow for
Community living // THE HOWS