A life update; what have we been doing?

It’s been a long time since our last published blog post (except the Renogy 300Ah Lithium Battery Review) here at 4WDing Australia, and for that, I apologise. For the last 14 years we’ve been sharing content several times a week to help you travel, camp and 4WD your way around Australia, so our hiatus is far from the norm. There’s a whole realm of reasons for why we’ve had such a break, and I’ll delve into some of them below, without completely destroying our privacy.

The end of our Big Lap of Australia

For those following along, you’ll know that we spent just under 2 years travelling around Australia in our Hybrid Camper with our two boys, towed by our Isuzu Dmax. After a year on the road, we made the decision not to pre book and go to Tasmania, and to cap our lap at around two years. By June 2024, we were on our way home to Perth.

We decided to wind the lap up for a myriad of reasons, but overall felt we’d achieved what we set out to do, and we were all excited to move onto a new chapter of life in Perth. More on that below. We arrived home a few days prior to my Mums birthday, and surprised her at a family dinner, along with the other side of the family earlier on. It was bitter sweet arriving home, but knowing we had a lot planned made us excited, and keen to kick some goals.

I know if we were returning to the same life that we’d left prior, it would have been far less appealing.

Finding a new job

The first priority was to find a new full time role for myself. I could have gone back into the same industry I’d left 2 years earlier, but I was keen to try something new. I had a couple of online interviews in northern WA as we were travelling home, with one option looking promising for a number of reasons. 

However, a week after an in person interview and after we’d arrived back in Perth I was told I was too overqualified for the role, despite having made my intentions very clear from the beginning. Like everything in life though, it opened a couple of other doors. I turned two roles down in the previous industry, and then had an interview and follow up walk through at a place about as left field as you could find. I’ve been there for nearly 8 months now, and am thoroughly enjoying the challenge, and variety of work.

Selling our camper

We hadn’t even made it home to Perth before deciding we’d sell our Hybrid Camper trailer when we returned. Again, a lot of contributing factors, but in essence the ongoing costs (interest, registration, insurance, maintenance etc) combined with a low likelihood of extensive use meant it didn’t make sense to hang onto. Ironic, as I’d previously said we’d never sell it. Funny how things change!

I spent a good week cleaning it all up and repairing a few bits and pieces that had worn out, and then we advertised it, with another family picking it up less than 2 days later. We paid 51k for it, spent about 6k on it and sold it for 45k, after more than a thousand nights in it. Not bad!

Finding a second car

When we left on our lap of Australia, I handed my previous work vehicle in, and coming back meant we needed to get a second set of wheels. I wanted a decent condition, low kilometre Toyota Corolla for around 8k, but quickly found that the prices had not come back down to where they were prior to us leaving, and spending anything less than around 7k was going to get you a vehicle with questionable reliability.

I ended up diving into the world of Honda Civics, which are far cheaper, with much nicer features and arguably as good in terms of economy and reliability, and picked up a 13 year old Civic with 65,000km on the clock. It’s been brilliant, and perfect for me to run back and forth to work with…until… an 80 year old lady wrote it off cutting the corner near our place. 

We now have a new vehicle on order, which again, is totally left field but I’m excited for it. More on that later. There’s also another addition coming to our household, which I’m super excited for.

Preparing our house for sale

Again, in the midst of selling our camper and looking for a job, we began the task of preparing our house for sale. We’d long since decided that 380m2 of block was not nearly enough for our family (mainly the two boys) going forward, and we had 13 years of wear and tear to work on so it was in the best possible condition.

We scrubbed, had it painted, did a fair bit of work in the gardens, cleaned and fixed all of the jobs we’d put off for so many years, before listing it on the market. 

Searching for our forever home

We’d been talking and looking at properties for at least a year prior to arriving home, and were looking for something 1500m2 +, from Lesmurdie down to Serpentine and in towards the coast. These sort of properties don’t come up very often, and we thought about a lot of different options.

Back in Perth, we visited everything from incredibly big homes in Bedfordale to old, run down homes on 20,000m2 blocks and everything in between.

In the end, we found a property that ticked more boxes than any other, and started talking figures with the real estate agent.

Making our move

With the Perth property market as hot as it was, we made the decision early on to take bridging finance out. This meant we could make an offer on our dream home not subject to anything bar the usual finance, and it ended up working in our favour with a higher offer being rejected over ours, as we had less conditions. 

We paid more than what we wanted, but still to date, I’ve not seen anything that would have suited us as well, for less. We packed everything up and moved it in two big truck loads, with the help of friends and family just before Christmas of 2024.

We’ve got a big shed, lots of back and front yard, 10 chickens and ample room for fruit and vegetable growing!

What we’ve been busy with

Asides from the above, we’ve been busy moving the kids into a new school, and doing work around the new property. The vast majority of the major work was done, with only minor repairs and basic changes needed.

I’ve moved about 40 cubic metres of sand to fill in parts of our property from friends places and other parts of the block, with a whole heap of top soil brought in too. We’ve just finished spreading nearly 50m3 of mulch, and have started on a cubby house for the boys. We’ve planted about 30 fruit trees so far, with another 15 or so ready to go in over winter.

There’s been a huge amount of sorting out furniture and our belongings, given that much of it we hadn’t seen for 2 years whilst we travelled!

We installed a 13kW solar system, and I’ve set up two mini off grid setups in the house that run our freezers and study.

Our big lap series

We still have a heap of content to share on YouTube, which Sarah has been editing when she has time, and the intention is to finish this off. We’re not expecting any major following there, but will make the videos for our memories, and for those that are keen to see where we ended up.

Here’s one of the latest episodes:

The future of this blog

After 14 years of slaving away on this blog, we have a lot of different emotions about this website. I’ll admit it was put up for sale a while back with no offers that made sense to accept, and it doesn’t look like Google are going to change anything to give us any real hope of fair monetization again. I don’t want to pull it down as I know how helpful it is to people based on comments and emails we get, and there’s always a glimmer of hope that the number of visitors will pick back up again.

We have taken a few products that we’ve been testing (Renogy batteries and DCDC’s) and an EcoFlow Delta 2 Max, and will be still hoping to share any future tips.

A new camper

We’ve recently purchased a 2005 Cub Camper, which was somewhat unexpected, and as I write this, we’re on our maiden voyage in Busselton! We haven’t booked anything beyond this trip, except for a few weeks overseas later in the year, but inevitably will do more trips in WA once we’ve got our block sorted a bit more!

See you out there

Hopefully that fills in a few gaps, and explains why we’ve been quiet! If you’ve got questions or comments, feel free to leave them below! Otherwise, we might see you out there! We hope you’re all well, and would love to hear of any future trips you have planned!

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