Sometimes life gets pretty full on and sometimes there are things that are more important in life than our weekly blog- and week 55 & 56 were just those weeks. Many apologies from us both for our radio silence over the past couple of weeks, but life just got in the way of our regular blogging. But we are back and ready to explain our absence…
Week 55 just passed by in a blur of meetings, phone calls and renovations. We just don’t know where it went. My Mum was in hospital and we have been trying to organise long term residential care for her. The hospital staff, social care and ourselves are in agreement that Mum is no longer safe to live an independent life in her own home. Many months ago when Dad had just died, the GP said that we would know when the time was right for Mum to change her care arrangements and that time is now. Her dementia has been getting worse, with her struggling to keep up with her medication which has made her more tired, which has made taking medicine harder, which has made her more tired…and the downwards cycle continued.
After much wrangling with Social Care and struggling to understand the exact details of the arrangements, we have finally got our head around it. We spent the week visiting a range of local residential homes and finally found one that we think Mum will love. Care homes have moved along way since the mid 70’s and 80’s when I recall visiting elderly relatives as a child…some more than others!
This week we had a frenetic 48 hours once we had made a final decision to set up the placement, making sure Mum has everything she needs from her house with her in the care home and then settling Mum into her new home. We feel terrible about Mum no longer being able to live at home, but all the professionals have advised us that she would not be safe… we do know that, it is just difficult to digest at this moment in time.
This whole experience has reinforced to us the importance of living for the moment and wringing every last experience our of each and every day. As Dad regularly said “there’s nowt in getting old” and he was right. We take confidence from this experience that we are doing the right thing in our own lives, getting out and adventuring whilst our health allows. By retiring early, we hope to have 15 years of adventures before we even hit the UK pension age at 67. Of course, we could spend those years working and saving for our retirement, but to what end?
The most valuable assets we have at he moment are time, health and energy. By 67, many of those assets would be much reduced…even though we would probably have more money in the bank to show for our years of extra work. To have worked hard all of our lives to then see our savings and assets ravaged by long term care costs would be such a waste.
Renovations
So after all of the drama of the past 10 days, how do we catch you up on our renovations? Probably beat to make a list! Since we got back into the country:
Kitchen fitted in the first 3 days.
Fireplace ripped out and preparations made for the fitting of our stove. This has been slightly delayed as the chimney sweep who is due to complete the work has just had his first child…just after he ripped out our fire place!
Electricians have switched us on downstairs finally after months of no power at all. We now have lights, light switches, sockets, kitchen appliances that work and heating…such luxury! It has taught us to never to take electricity or heating for granted- if in doubt try going without such things for a few weeks are you will feel truly grateful for such simple things.
We have misted and painted all remaining walls downstairs.
We have fitted skirting boards downstairs- no mean feat considering there is not one straight wall, one square corner or one level floor in the house. Needless to say, we have become experts at the properties of various adhesives, caulks and fillers!
We have fully sanded the main bedroom floorboards. This doesn’t sound a big job, bit when you consider that we have not got any spare space to store the contents of that room whist we work, it becomes a bit more of a logistical nightmare.
The plumber has moved in for a fortnight over the Easter break to fit our new bathroom. It is a hell of a job, basically taking everything back to basics. We will have a new state of the art water heater, insulation to the walls and ceiling, heating and a shower that is considerably more than a trickle. It is quite amazing to watch the transformation, and we are constantly in awe of someone so skilled to be able to do the work so well.
Stress
The last 10 days have been a salient lesson for us. We thought that when we early retired we would take back control of our lives and become masters of our own destiny. We were wrong!
Life will always throw a spanner in the works and put best laid plans to rest. We had so much work on renovating the cottage, but the most important thing was Mums wellbeing- so something had to give and that was our blogging and YouTube projects.
This challenge that we have faced over the last couple of weeks reminded us of the stress bucket analogy. We all possess a stress bucket in our lives that has a certain capacity. Stress in itself is not a bad thing- it helps us get fired up for important things and gives us energy to sustain our efforts. The problem comes when we have too much stress in our lives and our stress bucket overflows. The best and quickest solution to this overflowing bucket is to remove some of the stressors that are taking up needless space in the bucket. For us that meant temporarily removing our blog and YouTube commitments from the bucket. Now that things have settled down with Mum and the house, we have more space in our bucket to reengage with these projects- so we are back!
It’s been a testing time, but we truly believe in the famous (and unattributed) quote: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Have a fantastic week,
Richard and Jackie.
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