Homes Under The Hammer

Selling Our House To Fund Family Gap Year

Firstly, I must say that I am disappointed in myself for having not written here for quite a long time.

Largely this is because I haven’t made any tangible progress on our travel plans, because for most of the last couple of months I have instead been absorbed in painting several rooms of our house in various shades of beige so that we can get it ready for sale.

Getting a house ready for sale may make for addictive daytime television, but I figured that you probably didn’t need a full account of colour choices and sand papering techniques within this forum.

Fortunately the decorating is over for now and our house is officially up for sale, which certainly feels like one of the first major steps towards realising our plan of taking a round the world family trip.

“Trip” doesn’t quite feel like the right word to describe a journey that will last a whole year, as I think it conjures up images of popping to the shops to buy some milk. However, I don’t really like using grandiose language (see what I did there) to describe our ‘trip’ before it has even started. Once we are back from our year away then maybe I will feel entitled to re-label this ‘trip’ as a round the world family adventure / extravaganza / odyssey, but only once we can justify such hyperbole.

Anyway, getting vaguely back to the point, I was also reminded today that this time next year we will potentially be preparing for quite a different Christmas than we are used to. Our rough travel itinerary would, at the very least, suggest that we will be spending next Christmas somewhere rather warmer than England…even though we are currently basking in almost summer-like temperatures of 15c.

While we plan for better weather next year, we will miss being able to share this time of year with the rest of our family and with our friends. We spent a lovely afternoon at the park with my sister’s family today, taking the kids for a play  / dogs for a walk. We really don’t do this often enough, partly due to the practicalities of everybody being busy, sprinkled with some laziness on my part, and then probably quite a large dose of complacency on my part that family will always be there…so why rush.

The idea of taking a year away is largely designed so that we can spend more time together as a family of four, but there is obviously a trade-off here in that we will see much less of everybody else. Maybe our next trip needs to be a whole Keating / O’Connell family road trip, but I’m not sure anybody is ready for that just yet!