My house

Making this house ours has been a leisurely process so far as we find ourselves more focused on schoolwork, but it's already our home. As with all new homes, we're discovering an escalating list of problems now we've moved in, but I'm still so thrilled we found this place. It's perfect for us.

I knew we needed a guestroom, even if it was a dining room that we used as a guestroom. I like having people to stay. I'm an introvert, but I enjoy being around other people, and as a single mother, I really appreciate having adult company in the house. 

The house has an extra room downstairs that the sellers were using as a study. I decided I wanted a library more than a study, so I flogged my desk on Facebook Marketplace and put the bookshelves up instead. It's going to require some creative organisation to make it a comfortable bedroom as well, but a sofa bed is on its way. I've always wanted a library and if the idea of bedding down in a roomful of books doesn't appeal to you, you are no friend of mine.

The other thing we needed was room for our sofa. Our sectional is a good size by American standards, and bloody massive by British ones. Our mover was dumbfounded. I knew from the room measurements there was the physical space for it, but I wasn't sure how it would fit around the door, radiator, kitchen...

Thankfully, it looks like it was made for this room, dividing the space beautifully, though I may want to replace the round kitchen table with a rectangular one in due course. I credit the sofa for the cats settling in so quickly. The fact that this was their third move in eighteen months almost certainly helped, but the sofa means home in a way nothing else does, and the cats were purring and confident as soon as they found it.

For the first time, the children have a home with a fireplace! Two in fact, since the one in my bedroom has been left in place, although it's purely ornamental now. The massive fireplace downstairs has been redone and fitted with a woodburning stove, which we're all getting the hang of using. In this grey, mizzly weather and the repetitive grind of lockdown, it's very nice to curl up on the sofa (cats included) for cosy evenings in front of the fire.

Upstairs, I have a couple of candles in my grate, and my grandmother's silver pheasants on the 'hearth'. When I was a little girl, those pheasants were permanently falling over on her hearth, and now they can fall over on mine. 

I have her old secretary next to it as well. As I said, I didn't want a study. Nan's old-fashioned little fold-out desk is fine for paperwork. I should perhaps buy a new filing cabinet, but for now, I've put everything into a concertina folder. In this era of 'going paperless', we have fewer documents to store after all.
 

My daughter wanted a conservatory. Luckily for her, the owners of twenty years ago followed the home-improvement fad of adding one. However, they were more ambitious than most homeowners who squeezed in a small glassy nook along the patio. The conservatory matches the length of the kitchen and living room, with a deep bay area and two different exits to the outside.

I have plans for this to be the 'teenage hangout room' when the kids brings friends over in the future, possibly doubling up as extra sleeping space in the summer months. Ideally, I'd like to put a proper roof on it to make it more usable in cold or hot weather, but owing to its size, I'm not sure I can afford that.

For now, the conservatory is acting as a box room, stacked up with the things that we haven't figured out what to do with yet. However, I've kept enough space clear for a sort of nest with the old papasan chair and two recently-gifted giant beanbags. When the sun comes out, it warms up quickly into a luxurious respite for us: cuddling down into the beanbags even as we bask in vitamin D and listen to birds sing...  The cats are loving it.

The cats are also loving the garden. The flat had a rectangle of grass with no undergrowth for them. Here, we have shrubs galore. Two owners back was a lady who was passionate about exotic gardens, and her legacy is a small fortune in landscaping and lots of different plants.

As far as the mogs are concerned, they like eating the ornamental grasses (and then being sick), and the retaining wall that runs up the side of the garden makes a perfect secret tunnel for them behind the plants.

I like that they can't get out. Cars don't have to slow down for our hamlet, and they whizz by at 60mph. In our cats' younger days, we could never have lived here. Now that they're old and arthritic, they've no interest in trying to climb the fencing. Though Trog does keep eyeing up the pergola....

There's a child's swing on the pergola, which I wasn't expecting the previous owners to leave. My two love it, even if it's a lot tamer than the swing we had in the States. We still have that swing, but there's nothing in the garden with the proper height for it. That's one wish we didn't get, but we're more than willing to make this concession. 

If I were a fictional character, seeking refuge in Cornwall after a heartbreak, there would be a country lane running from our house to the sea. In reality, nothing that close to the coastline is in our budget, but we're only a few miles from the coast, tucked away from the worst of the summer traffic. Our house is semi-detached rather than a self-contained cottage, but the building is a century old—thankfully much modernised in the last four years—and when we moved in we found a box-file containing the information on all the previous owners.

For most of my house's existence, it's been owned by women: a widow and a spinster who held it for almost fifty years until both had died; another who retired here at the beginning of the century and only sold the house when she had to move into a care home. I like knowing that. Knowing that it's been a home to women, to older women who've loved and lost. Their feet wore the grooves in the hallway's stone steps, and now mine will deepen them.