I’m not sure anyone has missed the fact I haven’t done a blog post since the middle of February.  I have a good excuse … my dog ate it.  Ok that is a lie, but I do have a good excuse, which I will relate to you, dear readers (or reader – Hi Mum!).

About this time last year, in the middle of a cold Christchurch winter, I jokingly said “If we can work from home, why can’t we work from Fiji or the Gold Coast?”.  This simple statement set the wheels in motion and the cogs of the mind into action.  As someone who feels the cold terribly, quite simply, WTF was I doing living in a cold climate?  What was keeping me in Christchurch?

It boiled down to three simple things –

1. Work
2. My lovely home
3. Family

Work would be a hard one to replace, I very much enjoy my work and believe very much in the company I work for.

My lovely home… well I felt the same about the last home we had too.  It could be replaced, and home is where your stuff is.

Family … we’ll come to that soon.

So we broke the news to the family first.  Then to work – giving them the heads up that we were considering moving.

But the big question was where to go?  As NZ passport holders we essentially had the choice of further north in NZ or Australia.  Technically I could have got my UK passport and we could have moved to Europe (spoiler alert, probably wouldn’t have been a good choice) but we didn’t even consider that as an option.

Places on our list in NZ that we shortlisted were Nelson, Hawkes Bay and Tauranga.  All for their climates.

In Australia we ruled out Sydney and Melbourne due to the cost of home ownership and commuting time to work.  We also ruled out Adelaide, Newcastle and Darwin for the weather (too erratic or tropical).  This left Brisbane, Gold Coast or Sunshine Coast – all in Southern Queensland.   All subtropical, with a relatively stable climate, sunny and dry in winter, warm and humid in the summer.

Looking at the job market, Sunshine Coast didn’t appear to have the same work opportunities so we crossed that off the list too.

This left us with Brisbane and an hour south, the Gold Coast.

What better way to scope a place out than to visit in supposedly the worst time of year – the middle of February – the hottest, most humid and wettest month.

We arrived on Saturday morning, and by Sunday had decided this was where we wanted to live.  Monday and Tuesday we scoped out the suburbs we thought we might want to live in.  Wednesday we viewed some houses for sale.  By Thursday night we had paperwork signed on purchase of a house.  Friday was a visit with the mortgage broker signing up paperwork and home again Saturday.

Then the hard bit… over the course of the next 3 months we had to sell two properties, move out of our house, ship our greatly downsized amount of stuff and move my Mum and dogs with us.  Dad took the cats (due to their antique status) and arranged to move him into a retirement village.  We also helped Robert’s Mum pack up and sell her place so she could move to France to be with Robert’s sister’s family.

So here we are, 4 months later, happily living on the Gold Coast in Australia.  All the hard work and stress was so worth it.  We love it here.

Still working from home until we secure new jobs.  I feel so fortunate to have such an amazing employer, they are going to be hard to beat.

And today is the coldest day of the year – I’ll take it – 17C and sunny today with an overnight low of 7C.  I sure won’t miss biking to work in negative temperatures in the dark…