It’s a funny old thing, buying a house. You don’t get to spend much time in it before you do the deal – you go twice, three times if you can wangle it, any more and people get irritated – and then you sit on the sofa in your old house for months on end whilst all of the legal stuff happens, repeatedly scrolling through the pictures on Rightmove and scrutinising the floorplan and trying to piece it all together in your head.
And then you actually move in, and all of the previous owners’ furniture has gone and there are big holes where the telly used to be and light fittings dangling from the walls and bits of peeling wallpaper where the bedhead was and the carpet never looks quite as “spotless” as it did when you were viewing and the “immaculate” bathroom has a wonky toilet-roll holder and limescale on the taps. And that’s if you’re buying somewhere that needs “absolutely no work” (that was a big draw, for us, with this house); if you know that there’s some tarting up to be done then that’s a whole other ballgame again. It’s always five hundred times worse than you initially thought, when you arrive to the empty shell and see the extent of the rising damp or the rankness of the “original” kitchen or open the oven to be greeted with some sort of cremated alien species stuck to an ancient baking tray. But anyway, it’s fortunate to be able to buy a house at all...