Hello friends...long time, no see!

As you gathered, my mental health wasn't great....I was really struggling.

Shortly after my last post in October 2017, I took a weeks holiday to spend with my daughter over October school holidays.  This became my first week of self certified sickness.  Eventually my GP signed me off until January.

Throughout this time I really didn't improve much, I couldn't even use the email or telephone to speak to our local mental health services about accessing support let alone leaving the house to attend counselling.

My employer was less than supportive, in fact began to pick holes in my work....I gathered from this that he was searching for reasons to sack me (especially as he had said as much and it had got back to me!). His attitude was one that I felt I could no longer work with and with the support of my fabulous husband, resigned on 11th January!

Throughout this time, my husband had also been signed off, his employer was also incredibly unsupportive of his health issues.  He eventually couldn't be bothered to fight for support and also resigned in late January!

So here we were...both 51....both without employment...both unfit to work!  We have been positive and have chosen to call ourselves retired!

Thankfully, having worked extra hours last year, received a redundancy payment from my previous job and a tax refund a couple of weeks ago, we have the equivalent of our income until the end of April.

In addition we no longer have a huge petrol bill.  We also cook every meal from scratch and save on our grocery bill.

We haven't been wasting our time and we haven't been pushing ourselves and forgetting our recovery.

We have started packing ready to sell our home and as we pack each room, we clean and if required decorate....and then photograph ready for our sales details.

I've not got those photos to hand so instead I have these photos which aren't too good as they were for personal use, but you get the idea....

...wish I'd done a before photo (not that I'd have shared that with you!).  Our bedroom looked like an episode from a hoarding programme on TV!!

We've also taken the opportunity to visit Cumbria twice to house-hunt, not successfully....except to hone our understanding of what we like and need and what won't do.  We've had great fun sledging and snowballing, riding the local railway at Alston and making friends!  Yes, already!

So....I am still here, things have changed at an incredible pace, I am so sorry to have deserted you for so long.... And I can't promise to post weekly, but I will now do my best to keep a regular flow going!  And see if I can get back on track with sharing ideas on budgeting, free or cheap things to do, recipes and other types of making and of course progress towards our move.

Take care until we meet again,
Bye!