UpLiving

Hi, our names are Jade and Daniel. And this is our wee guy, Koa.

I (Jade) am from the UK and Daniel is from Ireland. We met during a snowboarding season in New Zealand 2016 and just seven months after meeting, we’d fallen pregnant. On the other side of the world. Away from our family.

This is our story about how we transitioned into that chapter of adult-life where we wanted to create stability and security for our family, but we didn’t want to pay somebody else’s mortgage. Where we wanted to continue living a lifestyle characterised by freedom, that which didn’t seem compatible with the ‘requirements’ of this life stage.

This is where ‘UpLiving’ descends from. ‘Upcycling’ means to ‘reuse in such as way as to create a product of higher quality or value than the original.’ This is our story of recreating this chapter of life so that for us, it would be of higher quality and value than society told us this life chapter should or needed to be. We didn’t need to abandon our travels. We didn’t need to see all of our hard earned income burn every week. We would create a life, a ‘living’, that suited us. Not the system.

We decided to take a risk when Koa was five months old. We moved out of the sleep-out we were renting, into a caravan and built our own Tiny House on Wheels using mostly upcycled material. We will share, in blog posts, how we did this in as much detail as we can remember.

We’ll also share how we raised Koa without spending barely any money. We want to demonstrate and PROMOTE, how it is possible to transition into parenthood and home-ownership without conforming to what society tells us we must.

We hope you enjoy our story.