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.

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...

City Men: Country Wives - Drowning not waving!

The Money Pit!

Today I sat on the stairs and bawled my eyes out in front of my best mate. J said  little but just looked at me as I rambled on between hiccoughing sobs careless of my eye-makeup, careless of the snot dripping from my nose.

He’s the type of guy you feel safe to do this in front of, it’s why we chose him, to be Godfather to Bog Boy after all. There needed to be someone here that could act as a buffer for me and the children when it all gets on top of me.

And today I felt like I was drowning not waving…

I remarked it doesn’t take much anymore to have me off in hysterics. But honestly I haven’t cried like this for years. Some say it’s cathartic to have a jolly good cry perhaps they are right. My eyes ache now and I feel like it must be at least midnight but there again the utter exhaustion may help me sleep better and tomorrow will be brighter.

It certainly felt anything but bright at 2pm this afternoon as I sat there snot dripping.

“I hate this place, I loathe it. I’m selling it!” I howled and punctuated my statement by stamping me feet on the stairs until they rattled.

The house was unmoved.

It’s heard it all before, especially from me.

“I can’t take it anymore, I can’t do it anymore.” I wailed.

I looked at J and I could see he was about to say that I could and I have done and I will so I forestalled him.

“I don’t want to do it anymore,” I heaved out between sobs, “I don’t want to cope. I want to make it stop!”

“I hate Suffolk. I hate this place. I never wanted to come here!” I continued to wail. “And the fact that I don’t have the Internet is just too much…”

We have the honour, nay privilege, of living in an Internet black spot and I have to get my connection with the big bad outside world via a convoluted and complicated network of routers and satellite dishes as BT  ain't that interested. It works, usually but every now and then, especially when I am on a deadline, it doesn't.

Then I have to get in touch with Ra. Ra is godlike but like most ancient gods one isn't actually too sure they exist. I have evidence that people round here believe he exists but I haven't actually seen him in so long that I fear he is now mere legend. He NEVER answers his phone and he NEVER tells you what is going on. So I tend to leave increasingly and frequently more and more bizarre messages in my efforts to contact him and more importantly getting him to contact me to say that he has heard what I am saying and that he know and is dealing with t4he problem. NOW!

You get the God like drift here. Basically you have to put your trust in Ra and he will deliver.

Sometime though I actually need to hear that on the telephone. And after four hours of futile calls. texts and general frustration it was all too much.

J gave me a great big hug and I sobbed some more leaving a nice snotty trail down the front of his jumper.

He held onto my shoulders and looked me in the eye: “It’s not just about the fact that you don’t have the Internet again is it,” he said.

That man knows me too well.

Of course it wasn’t about the Internet though as I said it was the last straw.

Suffolk is a funny place. You actually have to want to go there as it’s not on the way to anywhere in particular. It’s sort of a dead end. A bucolic, slightly dirty and otherworldly, dead end with a Nuclear reactor on its coast.

I am sure there are plenty of people who love Suffolk but having been dragged here by my husband seemingly on a whim because he said so with no  real thought having gone into it a decade before I am still kind of immune to its charms.

I know I should have got over myself but when things like the Internet goes down for four days and I cannot do my work let alone blog or tweet or indeed even email it just reinforces how terribly isolated the place is.

I did SO love London and I had SUCH a great job, one I enjoyed and was actually good at and having to give that all up to take on a 500 year old decrepit house (even if I was one half of the idiot pair that fell head over heels in love with it and bought it willy nilly) spend ten years doing it up, squandering oodles, and I mean oodles, of thousands of pounds on it foregoing holidays, new clothes, new cars and god know what else – it sometimes just doesn’t feel worth it.

Not when I still have oodles and oodles STILL needing spent on the damn place because I got diddled by the original builders we employed (but that’s another story).

So sitting in those stairs eye makeup smeared down my face, snot dripping and hiccoughing I admitted it.

“Charlie is going to London!” I broke down into hysterical sobs again. “It wasn’t part of the deal!”

No the deal stated that if I did HAVE to go and live in the back of beyond HE was going to be coming home every night – because after all I HAD given up and AWFUL lot.

But times change and sometimes you get new jobs and sometimes there is an economic downturn and your house has eaten up every last cent so your husband has to work harder than ever before and you’ll just have to accept that you need to be a tad more flexible about life.

But it doesn’t mean you have to like it.

And I don’t.

I don’t want Charlie to be renting out someone’s spare room during the week in London, I want him home not because of the deal but because I am going to miss him.

Terribly.

PS. It still pisses me something chronic though that the Internet is so unreliable…blooming backward county!

City men; Country wives

I think there have been books written about this and films and I know there have been plenty of lies but it’s strange to be living it – City men and country wives.

It’s not what I thought would happen to me when we got married. I didn’t expect to be stuck out in the countryside in a large house which we can ill afford to run let alone pay for.

Don’t get me wrong, I am lucky I have all this but I’d give my right arm not to. I envy those wives whose husbands are home in time for supper, whose kids see their dad every day at breakfast.

I tackled him about it last night saying that things had got to change for all of us. I begged. I threatened. I pleaded and I even cried.

But you know what the whole thing was turned on me. The reason we are in this situation is because of me.

Now I don’t remember saying I wanted to live in a big house in the country, in fact what I did say was we had to move from Streatham because he wouldn’t let me change the décor which his last girl-friend had done nor move any of my stuff in. It was a huge bone of contention in our first year of marriage and nearly caused me to leave.

Perhaps I should have done.

But then I wouldn’t have had my boys.

I am not asking to move now, for I realise that my husband won’t. I am asking that he puts us, his wife and his kids a little higher up his agenda.

He says I am too dramatic and that I am always whinging about my lot when I should be grateful. A little of me agrees. But like many a country wife before me I am lonely. I miss my husband.

We don’t talk much because we are both so tired at the end of the day. It seems that all the energy we can muster goes on eating supper in front of the telly. Actually, I now have supper with the boys because he never tells me when he is coming home and I hate eating on my own.

When I point this out he rounds on me saying that when he is at home of an evening I am always upstairs on the computer. I wouldn’t be if I was given some warning I should have said, but you know when you are in the middle of an argument the words you wish to say just get stuck in your throat.

He’s not a bad man. He can be utterly delightful but he is in the thrall of another – his work; a mistress who is sucking my man dry and giving him delusions of grandeur. He’s the big I AM.

And he thinks he is being reasonable.

He thinks his life is perfectly fine and because he thinks so I should as well.

I tried to make him understand that his life would not be perfect if I weren’t here. It just wouldn’t happen and do you know what his reply was?

“You always look at the worst case scenario! If you weren’t here. If something happened to you, your parents would rally round and so would mine.”

So that is where I stand. A country wife married to a City Man.