We Moved Mum Into the Backyard. Here’s Why It Was the Best Decision Our Family Ever Made.
I want to be upfront about something before I tell you this story: I was not the one who suggested it.
That was my husband, Dan. And when he first floated the idea of building a secondary dwelling in our backyard so that my mother could move in, my immediate, visceral, entirely unfair reaction was a very firm no.
We’d bought our place in the Illawarra five years earlier. A wide block with a decent-sized
backyard that had become, in practice, a graveyard for Dan’s half-finished garden projects and our kids’ abandoned outdoor toys. Plenty of space. But the idea of my mother living twenty metres from our back door felt, at the time, like a boundary I wasn’t ready to negotiate.
I’ve thought a lot about why I resisted. Partly it was the practical side of things. The build, the cost, the disruption to our routine. But mostly, if I’m honest, it was something more personal. I’d spent a lot of years building a life with a comfortable bit of geography between my parents and me. Changing that felt like a bigger shift than I knew how to think about.
Then Mum mentioned, very casually over the phone one night, that she’d been feeling a bit lonely lately.
She wasn’t making a big deal of it. That’s not her style. She just mentioned it, the way you mention the weather. But I heard it. And I thought about it for days afterwards.
She was 72, living alone in a perfectly nice unit forty minutes away, with a full life and good friends and absolutely no interest in being a burden to anyone. But she was also getting older, and the distance between us suddenly felt less like independence and more like an oversight neither of us had quite named yet.
The conversation with Dan that followed was one of the better ones we’ve had. We talked about what we actually wanted for the next chapter of her life, and ours, and what we wanted our kids’ relationship with their grandmother to look like as they grew up.
We called a granny flats Illawarra specialist the following Monday.
What followed was about four months of planning, approvals, and construction that I won’t pretend was entirely without moments of doubt. There were weeks when the back garden looked like an archaeological dig, and our kids treated the construction crew as daily entertainment. There was one afternoon when I stood in the half-built space and tried to imagine what it would feel like when it was finished.
And then it was finished. And Mum moved in. And something shifted in our family that I’m still finding words for.
She has her own front door. Her own kitchen. Her own life, entirely on her own terms. She comes over for dinner when she feels like it, which is often, and goes home when she’s ready, which sometimes happens mid-conversation, and we all find this completely endearing. The kids wander over on weekend mornings and come back smelling like baked goods. She’s teaching our daughter to cook properly, the kind of unhurried, from-scratch cooking that I’ve always meant to do more of myself.
The practical side matters too. We know she’s well. Every day. Not from a scheduled phone call but just from proximity and the natural rhythm of family life. She’s twenty metres away. That’s a very particular kind of reassurance that I didn’t fully appreciate until I had it.
What I couldn’t have anticipated is how much this arrangement has given back to Mum herself. She has company whenever she wants it and solitude whenever she needs it. She has a
relationship with her grandchildren that goes beyond school holidays and birthday dinners. She has a role in our daily life and we have one in hers.
We hear a lot about the costs of multigenerational living. The build, the footprint, the planning involved. What gets talked about less is what it gives back. To everyone involved, across every generation.
I was wrong to resist it. I’m glad Dan was patient enough to keep the conversation going.
