Our Cunning Plans

Time to share some of our official business plan, as submitted as part of our croft application. The plan is already subject to tweaking but I'm aware we've not really shared it here.

Summary
To build our family home and make our livelihood on the island of Rum. To become part of the community and work alongside others to preserve the ethos of Rum as a wildlife reserve along with helping it to grow into an established and sustainable community for the future.

Plan
We will create a smallholding from the croft with land given over to growing crops and rearing livestock. Our aim is for self sufficiency in food for our family plus residual produce for sale or exchange in the community and to tourists.

We also plan to use the land to capitalise on the existing tourist market and help to grow it further from a campsite or other holiday accommodation (e.g. eco camping pods). Further potential revenue streams would come from cottage industry type arts and crafts, preserves and produce.

Our longer term plans include creating an educational centre for WWOOFers and a working holiday destination specialising in self sufficiency, alternative energy, livestock rearing and low impact living.

There, sounds like a plan doesn't it?!

If I've learnt anything (and I hope I have) about ambitious, unchartered territory, rather crazy plans it is that the only way to approach them is one step at a time, ready to make it up as you go along and change your end goal as and when necessary! The key thing is to be getting as much if not more out of the journey than the destination, infact who cares what the destination is anyway, that's the ending, let's just focus on the ride.

When we were planning to head off WWOOFing we began with a mammoth task ahead of coordinating the whole thing but by breaking it down into smaller chunks it all became feasible - one challenge at a time. The same applies here. For now the focus is on packing up the last remnants of our mainland life and getting to Rum. One step at a time.

Today we returned to Sussex, spent some time opening the pile of post that had arrived since we left nearly a month ago, caught up with family, took inventory of the food in our kitchen and had a very nice curry for dinner. Tomorrow we start the task of creating a job list, pinning some dates and prioritising to it and starting to tick things off.