Head over heart

Through my window

Sometimes you can’t follow your heart, however much you want to. It doesn’t make you feel good and you know, because it is your head speaking, that the decision you make will never leave you satisfied even if you know it is the right decision to make.

It wasn’t the right decision to take on this house as far as my head was concerned but my head wasn’t in charge all those years ago. We were young enough and dumb enough to think because we willed it so it would happen and for a while my heart got its way. It was a wildly romantic foolhardy thing to do and now the right decision is to sell – if we can.

I have spent the past 11 years making this place our home. I won’t tell you how much it cost but let’s say that it if we hadn’t bought it, sending the kids to private school, wintering in Aspen every winter and sunning ourselves in the dolce vita each summer would have been well within our means, and you might, just might, come close.

We saw it as an overgrown wreck and rescued it. It has been a labour, mostly of love and occasionally of sheer desperation.

Oh how I wish you’d seen it when we first arrived. Brown and orange pub carpet all over the place, mould, rot, rates, mice, mushrooms in the cupboards, holes in the roof, bats, gnats and horrendously overgrown garden all dark and dingy and smelling oh how it smelled. Now it is bright and airy and showing off in all its glory and finally having got everything done I cannot see how we can stay – at least that’s what my head says.

Life is tough for everyone; it’s tough for us too. I give up how many hopeful traders pop up our drive thinking that just because we are in the big house we have dosh to spare.

“No sweethearts, I cannot spend £500 on a pair of Lutychens Benches and no I don’t care if that is a bargain I just don’t have the money even if I did want them!”

“No I don’t want a standard 12 year old box pyramid at £150, read my lips I don’t have the cash to spare.”

“If I could afford £3,000 to spray tar shingle my drive I promise I would do it but as it is are you joking!?”

All of these terribly nice people live in cloud cuckoo land a big house doesn’t necessarily mean a bored housewife who needs to shop in order to survive. It just might mean an idealistic couple who are getting a heavy dose of reality.

Living the dream is expensive and time consuming and my boys need us to be there for them and I don’t want to spend my time saying no because the house comes first in both time and money.

We were ridiculously naive when we bought the house and now we have to grow up and sell it.

But my heart is railing against my head and I really don’t want to do it.

This is our home, it’s where my boys were born, I grew up and became a mother and wife here, I’ve, no we’ve, all been through so much, poured so much of ourselves in this wonderful old place.

I just can’t leave.

I cannot even think of putting it on the market but that’s my heart speaking and it's my head that is in charge now…

On Friday the estate agent is dropping by and I truly am dreading what he is going to say my heart will just die if he values it to high as we'll have to sell but if he values it too low we're going to be stuck and that could be disaster for us financially...