Last night I braved the Ballarat cold to watch an Irish movie called ‘Herself’ put on by the Ballarat Film Society. The movie was about a young mother who leaves an abusive relationship with her two daughters. She is put up in temporary housing that is miles away from her kids school and ultimately makes juggling her part time jobs and childcare incredibly difficult.
She is put on a housing waiting list which shows no signs of moving and is met with massive crowds at rental inspections or flats that are so shitty they would be unfit to raise children in. In the middle of her despair she googles ‘how to build your own house’ and finds an architect that has designed a house that will cost $35K to build. Having no experience at all she embarks on a journey to build her family their own home.
I sat there in the dark, drinking my thermal of peppermint tea being drawn into this woman's story. It got me thinking about the idea of home and what that means. In the movie the house was not just a building to keep her children safe but it was a symbol of her independence, strength and commitment to taking control of her own life.
When I reflect back on all of the houses I have lived in my life they have all played slightly different roles. I had 4 family homes that I can remember over my childhood, one in Christchurch and three in Wellington. All of these homes felt so safe, so comfortable and filled with the love of my family. They were a safe haven - somewhere to return to and know that everything will be alright. My parents are in the process of selling my childhood family home now and it is with mixed emotions that I say goodbye to the house I spent my teenage years in.
After highschool I first started flatting in Wellington with my boyfriend at the time and those houses were different again. I like to think of them as bee hives. Flatmates coming and going. Walking into the kitchen and not knowing who will be in there. Learning how to actually live with other people who aren't your family. Home had morphed from a safe haven to an active classroom where you learnt the social skills of becoming an independent and self-regulating adult - as well as how many meals you can get out of a 10kg bag of rice and a selection of condiments.
This phase lasted a fair bit longer than I expected. There were a few brief stints when I lived just with my boyfriend at the time but it was still referred to as flatting. I like to imagine we were playing house. The older you get, the less you want your furniture to be made out of milk crates. Going from student to professional normally involves a trip to Ikea that takes you one step closer to becoming a ‘sensible adult’.
I regretted all of the Ikea furniture I bought when I broke up with my boyfriend and then had to find a flat that needed everything! It was a disaster and the first time I’d moved in with people I didn’t know. This is when I realised that ‘home’ wasn’t where I lived. Home become other people's couches and the bar of the local pub. Home was my people rather than a particular place.
Fast forward to moving in with Matt after only dating for three months and I was home again. We lived in a little flat in North Melbourne, our neighbours were our best friends and I finally had a home for all of this furniture I’d been carting round from flat to flat. We rented this cottage until we decided to become entrepreneurs.
Our next home was the second floor of the office in the factory we were renting. We used to dread inspections in case the real estate agent noticed we’d suspended a retractable clothesline to the roof of the factory (which is by far the best invention we’d ever come up with) or how well equipped our little kitchenette was - the spice rack would’ve raised eyebrows for sure! Factory life was good. It was like camping inside a warehouse but we made it very homely. The main problem was the internet was really bad so if you wanted to stream a movie you had to start doing it at lunch time for an evening viewing.
When we moved to Ballarat the ’factory’ life lasted for about 2 weeks before I cracked it. We rented a little 2 bedroom cottage which would become our family’s first home. This was home not just for us but for our children. The circle had been completed. We were now trying to create that same safety, comfort and loving space that we’re both so lucky to have as kids.
We stayed in that little house till the landlord became so obnoxious that we moved into our current rental where we have been for nearly 5 years. This rental has the best backyard you could ask for with kids but the house itself is so poorly insulated and maintained that I pretty much have the real estate agent (of which there have been 6) as a favourite on my phone.
The process of renting as an adult with a family is one of the most degrading things I’ve done of late. Some of the rental applications I’ve filled out are even more intrusive and demeaning than centrelink forms! How much do you earn? Do you have a car? How old is it? Where do your kids go to school? All this information is demanded yet nothing is offered about the landlord. We’ve had to threaten to take our landlord to VCAT twice to get simple maintenance requests completed.
While our current house might be a nightmare for Matt and myself, we have to remember that this is the first home the kids will recall from their childhood. I want them to feel safe and loved (which they do) in between its walls. This is what I resonated with in the movie last night. Home is just somewhere you want to feel safe in and it’s so incredibly heartbreaking when people don’t have access to this basic human right - not just a roof over your head, but to feel safe.
I came home from the movie really empowered by this woman's experience in building her own home. Matt and I are embarking on our own journey to build our first house together. We bought a tiny bit of land 6 years ago and luckily the value has gone up so much that we have enough for a deposit to build. It took 18 months to get the plans through council and we are still at the planning stages with engineers and building surveyors. We have been working on this for years and we aren’t even at the bank yet but we are always edging slightly closer.
The house we’re building is a show home for our prefab building system, the system we successfully use for TinyOffice. The driving force of the whole company is to create quality housing at an affordable price. We have a tiny budget for our house but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be able to build a quality home that will keep our family warm in winter and cool in summer. We designed this house ourselves so it would suit our family’s needs now but also in the years to come when we end up with a bunch of teenagers.
We haven’t had the best experience renting and consider ourselves very privileged to be able to build our own home (eventually...) but what about all the people who have a similar story to the women in the movie last night; where having a home is a life or death situation. I feel compelled now to work harder than ever to make sure our building system and the Tiny Homes we’re building are affordable and accessible to as many people as possible.
