Rural life, and especially remote rural life, is often much more different than people from the suburbs or city environments expect. That’s not intended as a means to disenfranchise or patronize those who may be willing and able to make this move, in fact doing so is a fantastic decision! You get to enjoy nature more readily, perhaps get more for your money when living in a rural area, and you can also enjoy a slower pace of life.
What matters is figuring out how to live in this new environment, as it’s not always easy to find every convenience at your beck and call. There are many lived experiences that change, too. For instance, if you live on a private rural road, odds are that you’ll be surprised just how dark it gets at nice, and how well you can see the stars thanks to the lack of covering pollution. This can be a great thing to consider, and it helps you reconnect with a sense of slowing down and living more authentically as a family or individual.
But what else should rural homeowners know? With the following advice, we hope to curate some handy tips and expectations, so that learning these ‘the hard way’ need not happen. With that, let’s consider:
Dealing With Lesser Convenience
While it’s unlikely you’ve chosen to live on the side of a mountain or three hours away from the next hours, it’s true that living in rural areas is somewhat less convenient than living in an urbanised area. We need not patronise you as to why. That means it can be important to figure out how you’ll cope with this, as perhaps a trip to the local supermarket may take more than twenty minutes each way rather than a simple five minute stroll.
For this reason, just in case of weather, and to ensure you don’t have to keep making these trips, it’s good to stock up on items. This might involve keeping a freezer full of meat, filling out your pantry, and making sure household items or utilities are kept in supply. This could also involve road grit for your driveway and lane (as most local authorities won’t go out of their way to help a road with five people living on it), and more. Planning ahead in this sense can help you achieve the best result, and in the end will help you remain prepared for anything.
Personal Repairs
An addition to our last point includes how much more you may be responsible for your local area, particularly on private roads. For instance, it might be that your road is filled with potholes (a consequence of tractors and heavy farm machinery using it over years and years), and you wish to ensure the repairs. This could involve meeting with the local community and raising the money over months to have those holes filled in, or concreted over. It may be your responsibility to deal with these considerations, and so it can be worth:
Keeping Close To The Local Community
In most small villages, everyone is aware of everyone else. This can certainly contribute to gossip and ‘small town syndrome,’ but it can also be tremendously lovely, and it can help you feel like you’re actually involved in an area and wish the best for it. This can certainly help you feel like your opinion matters, because it does. Helping out with the local celebrations at Christmas, helping to clean the local Church grounds, running charity drives, supporting local shops, and of course contributing to local neighborhood watch programs can all help you become an active participant in the process.
In some places, you may even be able to attend citizen councils to have your say or to organize events in the calendar in an official capacity. Keeping close to the local community, then, will help you feel connected, loving and appreciative of all that is around you.
Home Utilities
It’s also very important to plan for your home utilities from time to time. It might be, for instance, that your home cottage comes with an AGA cooker. This could mean that replacing the oil is an expensive process, but also helps heat your house every few months, allowing you to enjoy the best of rural and retro cooking and living.
It might also be that using propane, an excellent fuel source, is provided more appropriately from brands such as Annapolis Propane, storing these cylinders carefully to make sure you can thrive in the cold winter months.
Another important consideration, though less attractive, is setting up your septic tank. Rural houses are rarely connected to the industrial sewer system, and that means you need to ensure your plumbing leads to a septic tank that serves as safe storage for waste, and emptying this from time to time requires paying a specialist to come and take it away. Researching an appropriate maintenance service and booking automated visits can help you ensure your tank need not overflow, which can be a real problem if left for too long.
Home Security
By the simple virtue of living further away from most people, you are generally safer living in the countryside. That said, you also have less people around you to hear or observe you, and that means that protecting your home is important. Putting up property borders to ensure people do not encroach on your land is important, with the only exception being that of offering a public footpath or of allowing public utilities workers to access oil pipelines etc.
Home security can be helped by joining a neighborhood watch scheme as discussed earlier, but also by installing motion sensitive floodlights around your property, putting up warning signs, getting a dog with a loud bark (if not a large bite), and generally being observant, keeping your possessions locked in your garage, and still keeping an eye on your children. In this way, you can be sensible no matter what.
Final Thoughts
With this advice, we hope you can really enjoy your new move to rural living. You’re sure to love this most calming of living situations.
