There is a heaviness I have experienced about closing one chapter in life in order to start another when I am very much aware that the chapter I’m leaving behind includes some of the best days of my life.

Last week we shifted out of Devon Cottage. After weeks of sorting, preparing and organising - it was finally time to shift the last boxes into storage, pack up the few things coming with us in the van and clean all the surfaces as we closed the door behind us one last time and said goodbye to Devon Cottage. We thanked the property for all it had taught us and given us over the last five years. Grateful for our time being it's custodians.

Change in life is inevitable and constant. We made the decision to build a new lifestyle here at Devon Cottage and now we’ve made the decision to create a new lifestyle on the road. They aren’t polar opposites; both give us simplicity and freedom of our time. But we also knew it wouldn’t work for us to keep a foot in each life, we had to make the decision to leave one behind for the other.

Our lives are a series of the choices we make, taking us down different roads and even indecision takes away other alternatives from us. 

Leaving Devon Cottage means closing the door on some of the best times of my life, on a lifestyle I still adore. I guess the heavy emotion that I've never felt before about closing this chapter is because I’m leaving one good thing for another very unknown thing. In the past change has often looked like leaving behind something that no longer served me for some new possibility. This doesn’t feel like that. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just a new kind of change for me. ​

And in serendipitous timing, the day we handed over our keys to the real estate agent we also received news that our van was embarking on a ship headed to the port of Auckland and hopefully we will be seeing it in just a few weeks time!!!

We've spent the last month preparing for van life as we pack up our house, put things in to storage, purge A LOT and consider what we need to take with us to live on the road. In this YouTube episode I bring you along for the journey of downsizing from a 65 square metre tiny home to a mere 15 square metres of van!