I’m currently standing in the chaos that is our ‘kitchen’. The floor is still to be levelled and laid, and the kitchen is due to arrive next week. I’m beginning to wonder why I decided that documenting our Victorian farmhouse renovation and rebranding was a good idea! So many women are reaching their 40s and 50s, getting diagnosed with ADHD and/or navigating menopause — and realising they can’t keep living the way they always have… so they start again. Sound familiar?
The community I built with ADHD Menopause and Me has been amazing. My account was initially set up to support me and my kids through some pretty tough years. We went from a ‘typical’ family to an ND family with diagnoses of Dyslexia, Delayed Processing, ADHD and now Autism. All in the space of 5 years. I was trying to navigate menopause and raise awareness, but I couldn’t understand why I found it so hard. Walking alongside my boys through their diagnosis journeys taught me something unexpected. I was neurodivergent too. Suddenly, a lifetime of feelings I couldn’t explain began to make sense.
My journey looks different now. The boys are older, and life has shifted. But you are still here — and that means everything. I can’t wait to share this next chapter with you.
How We Got Here
Our youngest’s move to secondary school was, in a word, hard. What we’d hoped would be a fresh start quickly revealed itself to be something more significant. His struggles were deeper and more complex than any of us had fully understood.
Over the years that followed, getting him into school at all became the daily battle. Alongside the dyslexia and ADHD we already knew about, it became increasingly clear that he was also autistic with a PDA profile. Once we understand that, so much of what had felt confusing suddenly makes sense. But his difficulties at school were almost secondary to what was happening socially. Too trusting, too easily led, and younger than his years in ways that weren’t always visible on the surface. I watched him begin to form friendships that worried me. Find himself in situations I couldn’t always protect him from.
It was a lot. For him, and for all of us.
At the same time, life was shifting in other ways. Our two eldest had flown the nest, and for the first time in years, there was space. Space to breathe, to think, and to ask what came next. More than a decade earlier, we had built our first home from the ground up, and that itch had never really gone away.
So we made a decision. A deliberate, wholehearted one. We would move somewhere rural, somewhere slower, somewhere that might give Sam a genuine fresh start in an environment that actually suited him — and give us a new project to pour ourselves into, while still being a home our boys could always come back to.
What How Felicity Finds is now
If you’d asked me a year ago what this space was going to become, I’m not sure I could have told you. But standing in the middle of a half-finished Victorian farmhouse in North Yorkshire, covered in renovation dust with an ADHD brain running at full speed and a body doing its best impression of a malfunctioning thermostat, it became pretty clear.
How Felicity Finds is the honest version of this chapter.
It’s the farmhouse — Hall Farm, Victorian, Grade II listed, full of original features and full of renovation challenges I absolutely did not anticipate. I’ll be sharing every step of the restoration here, the wins, the disasters, the moments where we question every decision we’ve ever made. And of course, the ones where we look at an original sash window and remember exactly why we did this.
It’s the village — Thornton-le-Dale is the kind of place you move to and immediately wonder why you didn’t do it sooner. The beck, the countryside, the slower pace of it all. I want to share what rural life actually looks like when you swap a village just outside the busy city of York for somewhere with a slower pace, woodland in your back garden and the North Yorks Moors on your doorstep.
It’s the ND life — I’m AuDHD and menopausal and a mum to three boys who each come with their own version of complex, and I’m not going to pretend any of that is straightforward. The real talk about neurodivergence, perimenopause, and parenting ND kids stays, because it’s part of every single day here, and it deserves to be spoken about honestly.
And it’s the finds — the things that actually help. Products, tools, places, services that make life in this particular messy, beautiful chaos a little more manageable. Always honest, never just because I’ve been asked.
If you’re a woman in your forties navigating a big life change — or dreaming of one — and you want company that doesn’t pretend it’s easy, you are absolutely in the right place.
What’s coming…
I have a lot planned, and for once, the ADHD hyperfocus is working entirely in our favour.
Every Friday, I’ll be posting a Farmhouse Friday update — one room, one decision, one honest account of where we are with the restoration. We’re starting with the bathroom, which is the one space we’ve actually finished, and working our way through the rest of the house in real time. No staged reveals, no waiting until it’s perfect. You’re getting it as it happens.
I’m also putting together a proper guide to Thornton-le-Dale — the walks, the places to eat, the things the locals know that don’t make it onto any tourist website. If you’ve ever thought about making a move like this, I want that guide to be the thing that helps you imagine it for yourself.
And the AuDHD and menopause content isn’t going anywhere. In fact, I’ve got a post coming that I’ve been wanting to write for months about what executive dysfunction actually looks like when you’re also trying to manage a renovation, a family, and a rebrand simultaneously. Spoiler: it looks exactly as chaotic as you’d imagine.
The best way to keep up is to follow along on Instagram at @how_felicity_finds, or subscribe below to get new posts straight to your inbox. No spam, no schedules — just a new post when it’s ready.
This is a new chapter. The walls are old, the floors are (mostly) original, and I am very much a work in progress — but that’s rather the point.
I’m glad you’re here. I hope you stay.
Fay x
