Late last year we found out that the owners of our rental wanted to move back in and weren't going to renew our lease. Australia is in the middle of a housing crisis, we don't have enough homes to house everyone and we have a population growing at nearly 1M people per year.
I live about 3 hours south of the city of Perth, who has one of the lowest rental vacancy rates in the world at 0.4 percent, the town I live in, had zero rentals available when we found out. We started applying to anything that came up because people are living in tents and their cars due to a lack of housing... not a situation we wanted to find ourselves in.
I was stressed to say the very least. I wanted a home for my wife and our 3 kids. We asked around our community and someone reached out to me through social media and offered us their farm house that had been sitting empty. Now... there are farm houses (tiny shacks that don't cool in summer or heat in winter) and there are houses that happen to be on farms. This one turned out to be the latter. It is an incredible 4 bedroom home with massive entertaining areas and a dedicated office. We fell in love with the place immediately! We didn't have to go through the whole process of putting in an application and hoping that we "win" over the other 20-30 families who are also applying.
We've been living on the farm for the last 5 months now and I've got to say, we're fully converted to farm life. We raised some chickens, they give us 3-4 eggs per day, we re-established the vegetable garden and are getting some nice winter veggies. The amount of wildlife on the farm is incredible.
We're about 15 minutes out of town and have perfectly dark skies, which are amazing to photograph the Milky Way, but also the Aurora Australis that occurs fairly often!
I'll be sharing some more photos and stories from the farm in the future... it has been a super weird first half of the year for me. Hope you're all doing well!
Paul
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All photos posted are copyright Paul Pichugin unless otherwise stated.