Would moving to a very rural dream home be a mistake?

[bluejumperoo]

Seen a beautiful house over the weekend, literally my dream home. Only problem is it’s rural. So rural that no Amazon or takeaway deliveries. There’s a little shop. And it’s a tourist area so some parts of the year it won’t be so empty. A small restaurant around the corner but windy scary country pitch black lanes to navigate…

would I be crazy to entertain it. I’m 40 as is my dh with a 13 yo who also loved the house. School is actually 10 mins away and dc will be starting there from September hence us even entertaining it seriously tbh. . Most dc get a bus to the school as it’s out the way, but as the house is really big I’m hoping as dc friends get older they can all come to stay at ours (there’s a whole floor of extra guest bedrooms) and once dc goes off to uni I’m also hoping they can bring their friends back as it has a big cinema room, pool plus it’s in a rural tourist area so hoping that’s an attraction to help ensure we’re not left alone forever once dc has flown the nest. We had been looking for a generic family home until this one came along. Our only dc is close to us and I’m also thinking one day they might come back with their family to live as the house is big and Id love for that to happen so dc and future family doesn’t have to work as hard as we did. Saying that they’d have to wfh!

one big concern is that no one comes to visit us. We do throw massive parties once or twice a year and usually have big gatherings etc I’m hoping people can come and stay but not always possible. I have lots of hobbies that mean being happily at home so I do believe I’d be pretty happy but don’t want to turn into some mad cat lady at the same time!

I think im part mad and part on the verge of offering. Help talk me down out my ideas of being queen of the Manor House 😂

Personally I would hate it, we lived semi rural for a number of years when our children were babies/teens etc. really inconvenient. We live just outside a small city now and love it. I don’t go out very often due to my disability, but I can get whatever I need delivered, if DH wants a night off cooking, we can get any takeaway we fancy. Life will change as your teen gets older just bear this in mind, you will become a taxi service, until they pass their test.

This. And in those 6 years, be prepared for your child to be unhappy with the living arrangements

My main take away from your post is your emotional dependency on your only child with your bizarre expectations that your dream home will be the centre of all their teenage friends social life, then their uni mates and the ‘hopefully’ their spouse and family life. If you believe that other parents are going to do drop offs at your out of the way house especially in the evenings or winter you are mistaken.

This is all about meeting YOUR emotional needs - and you are setting yourself up to be disappointed as your engulfing/overbearing approach to your DC will likely cause pressure and conflict and they will move far away. I would spend some time in therapy looking at how you can refocus your fantasies and build out your own emotional life so it was more satisfying and balanced and not leaning on your only child. IMHO we raise our DC to be independent to understand and then work towards THEIR goals.

I was a little staggered at this post.

This is precisely the life we have. Adult children with friends staying and enjoying our home and land. They love coming! They drive so come and go, and are fully independent.

Before then of course parents didn’t mind dropping off, and would stay for the odd coffee or glass of wine.

There is no conflict, or issue. My DD’s are leaving for other country houses today, and travel all over. It’s a great life. The extra space offers comfort and options.

Op doesn’t need therapy if this is her dream! Heavens

It’s a definite no from me by personal experience. We did this 15+ years ago. Winters are so hard and isolated, you feel them much more when very rural. Summer tourist season was totally unbearable, out of area people like ants everywhere who have less respect for where you live which wears you down. I had to drive absolutely everywhere, did an average of 18,000+ miles a year as a SAHM, I now do 6-8,000 now we’re back in civilisation. Social circles are much smaller so less choice of finding like minded individuals and also less social options, I felt terribly isolated and I’m a very self sufficient person happy in my own company. Escape to the country always gives the rose tinted view of what living very rurally is like. It takes a very specific type of person or those born to it, to love it full time. For our DD, we moved back to civilisation as she turned 15, it was the best thing we ever did. She was pretty isolated beforehand, even though I did work hard driving her to everything I could.

A beautiful bigger rural house and land seems wonderful to begin with, but it soon becomes normalised and then all the down sides become apparent. Not being near healthcare, shops, railway stations or easily being able to attend cultural/music events as time goes by got me down. Also bizarrely I got quite stressed by the regular power cuts, think it was the final straw by then. As said, some people love it, but I’d really consider if thats really you deep down. We were lucky to sell quickly post pandemic as everyone wanted to move to the country then, but rural houses can on average take a lot longer to sell if you want to move back. All things to think about.

Wow, you're more than reading between the lines, you've entered some sort of wormhole that exists between the molecules of the page! i.e. you're either overly confident in your pop-psychology skills or you're projecting...

I find it easier to navigate windy lanes in the dark, as you can see headlight beams reflecting on the trees, etc. way before you can see the vehicle.

Our nearest neighbours are in their 80s and still love living rurally - I think it's probably made them as fit and able as they are now, as they're always out walking or gardening. Also not sure why a rural property would cost a fortune to heat? We're on year 3 of not having to buy any firewood for our stove as we can get enough from round about us. Even if we didn't, our heating doesn't cost any more than when we lived in town. There are also a fair few rural grants around if your house does need to be upgraded.

That's my idea of hell. Great that people are all different.

That’s it in a nutshell really, can you see past a beautiful location on a summer’s day and be totally realistic about what living there full time really involves all year round? Living in our rural country house nearly drove me insane, especially in the long dark winter months and I ended up nicknaming it the ‘Moth-trap’ as we viewed and bought it in summer. It would have been a lovely place for a holiday, but living there full time was a nightmare personally. It was certainly a learning curve for us.

I raised 3 DC in the same environment and they loved it. As adults they say if they have children they would do the same for them. It was a privilege to give them the freedom of a rural childhood. As for the whole ‘they’ll have no independence’ bollocks! They all drove at 17 and had busy social lives which I was happy to facilitate. Mostly their friends wanted to hang out at our house and have the opportunity to be a little feral. It was the best time ever.

I can’t square the no Amazon with being near a shop, a restaurant and 10 mins from school. It doesn’t sound ridiculously isolated?

Sounds absolutely lovely - you’ll go a long way to find a rural home with only a 10-minute drive to school and a little shop! You just have to accept that your kids will always need lifts to places until they can drive (which has its benefits, as you’ll always know where they are!). You’ll soon get used to driving on country lanes - tbh they’re easier at night as you can see lights up ahead.

Knowing where they are doesn't really apply - my siblings and I all went to friends' houses and then on from there to other places we hadn't necessarily mentioned... pick up from friend's again (potentially the next day).

Friends from school wanted me to go to theirs instead of coming to mine once we were about 14 - rather three of us sharing a small bedroom in a terraced house in town where we could go out and about than stuck at mine not able to get anywhere without a lift.

Very true , I still find it stressful but I have real anxiety about driving in the pitch black, I get so panicky, silly I know.

You are clearly an urban/city person in the wrong place. The winter in the country is equally as glorious as the summer. Every season is so different, and so pronounced. We really enjoy all of them.

I agree, I WAS in the wrong place. Thankfully we moved!! We now live on the edge of a historic vibrant cathedral town and have two national parks on our doorstep, so we have the best of both worlds. Winters where we lived very rurally consisted of a lot of mud, hours driving in bad weather on terrible roads to go anywhere, thats if the area wasn't cut off by flooding, and endless power cuts.

I couldn’t live anywhere Amazon didn’t deliver to. I thought they even delivered to the Scottish islands?

Yes, they do. We get regular Amazon deliveries. Even get next day delivery on some things. No takeaway or supermarket deliveries though.

Not silly at all! !

The average person would hate it. But you are not the average, you live semi rurally, a septic tank etc is already your normal, you currently have a lot of the inconvenience without the beauty of being in the middle of nowhere. The only real problem is when you age, but you can't buy a house now for what you might need in thirty years.

13 year old might love the house, but might not have fully grasped the realities of living there for his teen years. I had lots of friends who lived very rurally as a teen, and hated it. Most weekends were spend at sleepovers with the teens who lived in the town/city where there was stuff to do. We had one huge sleepover at my friend’s rural house, but it got very messy because there wasn’t enough to do.

Not the point of the thread but I am baffled and somewhat alarned at the extent to which Amazon delivery (or not) has apparently become so central to people's lives. I never order from them and 'manage' just fine. Am I missing something?

Not for me.

All those dream homes people build on Grand Designs literally in the middle of nowhere look horribly isolating to me.

That's just me though. I often think if I became wealthy I wouldn't move from where I live. I love being part of a community.

Paul Heaton for example is a millionaire, but lives in a normal terraced house because that suits him better.

I definitely think your lifestyle is more important than your house.

Find out if you are on the routes the gritter lorry comes through in winter. I live rurally in a village rather than an isolated house and it can be a long scary drive from home to a road where the gritters have been during winter.

Also ferrying kids about is a pain. I accepted that I would have to do a lot of that when we moved but it does start to grate after a while and it means they can’t be spontaneous. When DD got a Saturday job it also meant that my weekends were dictated by her shifts. When my eldest left for Uni, he moved to London and never looked back.

That said, I love it here. We have a shop and a small GP surgery and there are buses during the week. Whether it’s my forever home I don’t know.