How To Eat Your Words

“This is it”, she said. “We are done”, she said. “If we ever need more space, then we’ll get planning permission to put up a teepee in the back garden.”

Except then we got one of these, which naturally comes with one of these, and then my in-laws came to visit for a weekend with their toddler and baby and filled our little casa with glorious chaos and seemingly the entire combined contents of Mothercare and Toys R Us. And then we looked on Rightmove that very night to see what we could get for our money.

Turns out that what we can get for our money is a near 3000 square foot Victorian beast of a house with cellars, three floors, an attic and a huge jungly garden, about five minutes from where we are now. Yes, it hasn’t been touched in twenty years. “Requires a smidgeon of cosmetic updating”, said the estate agent, hilariously. Yes, the kitchen is so very hideous that it didn’t even feature in the property brochure. Yes, it has a proper old-school fuse box instead of a nice, safe, consumer unit. And a minor damp problem in one of the bay windows. And some rotten timbers in the basement. And the bathroom is turquoise. And after buying it, we’re going to have precisely zero money left to do it up and thus will have to live in it as it is for at least a year (yikes). But it has high ceilings! And beautiful bay windows! And stained glass! And the original floorboards (hidden beneath twenty year old filthy carpets)! And a cold meat slab in the cellar! What more could one ask for?

Our new back garden - taken by the lovely current owner

We move next week. And now I have something to blog about again (I have spent the past year playing with our magnificent daughter and her array of plastic toys, and haven’t touched a paintbrush or a piece of sandpaper in months) so am hoping to resume a fairly regular posting schedule. Mostly comprised of pictures of terrifyingly dusty cellars and cold meat slabs, natch. You have been warned!