How do you value your home?

Our House circa 1880

You can put a value on a house, in fact you can put a value on most things but putting a value on your home is a little more difficult.
Having had the Estate Agent round finally on Monday I now know an awful lot more about my house and indeed my home than I knew before.
For example my house is a lot larger than I thought - by about 2,000 sq ft. That's twice the size of my flat in London and that was considered a large two bedroom apartment. In fact 2,000 sq ft is a modest sized house in most people's language and I didn't even realise!
We've sort of seeped into filling the place up. It wasn't deliberate, because when we first moved in we only lived in the middle bit; a walk-in kitchen, two downstairs rooms and a bedroom and a bathroom upstairs. Gradually over the years, as we reinstated the house from wreck to habitable living space, we opened more and more of it up and spread. We bought chairs and tables, beds and cupboards as we needed so we never actually noticed how much we accumulated but looking at it through the eyes of the Estate Agent it was brought home with a rather sickening thought - how the heck am I ever going to be able to downsize?
The enormity of just that thought almost paralysed me as I tripped down the stairs while showing the Estate Agent round. I hope he didn't see the fear in my eyes or noticed how I gabbled.
To relax myself I started to listen to what he had to say - he was frightfully upbeat and optimistic and when at the end we sat down and got to the nitty gritty I was pleasantly surprised. The estimated value was more than I feared though not as much as I had hoped.
Selling the house will be a matter of semantics as the valuation is not quite enough to make the decision easy though not as bad as to make a move an impossibility.
But selling the home is a far more difficult problem.

Our House 2003 when work had just started!

As I showed off the place I told the agent all about the history of the house, the things that we had found and found out,  the stories behind the baby's skeleton in wall, the crude letters etched on the window in my office, poor pussy the mummified cat, the pram in the attic, the WAG who built the vast and garish 'modern' extension around the time Henry VIII was having a fling with Anne Boleyn,  how a Barley Baron farmer decided he needed to keep up with the Joneses in 1800s and Georginified the lot only to go bankrupt and have to sell.
And all the time I was telling the stories and making jokes and pointing out the carvings and the wall painting and other silly little things that we discovered int eh last decade as we brought this place back to life I saw how we had become part of the tapestry of the history of the house - a small part.
I'd like to think a crucial part.

Our House 2009

I looked out the window and I saw my eldest as a baby sitting on the seat of the big bright yellow decrepit dumper truck we acquired to do all the work that needed to be done. I saw him pretending to drive with his too large baseball cap on his head,laughing uproariously and banging excitedly on the horn.
I saw the men and boys who all worked so hard to bring this place back from wreck to home like ghosts laughing and chatting in my minds eye. All those memories crowding, demanding attention. Begging me not to forget.
And I know that my head should rule my heart but this house is too much a part of who my family is for any decision to be easy.
We LIVE here.
I suspect we will become history here too.