Downsize or Downstream?

Your house is just the way you like it. You've lived in it for ten years. The things you thought you couldn't live with when you moved in, have become the things you love the most. In the meantime you've made small changes here and there, redecorated a few times, been through Cut-price gallons of off-white, through Dulux to Farrow and Ball, replaced wall-to-wall carpets with sanded floorboards and retreated back to rugs because of the draughts and the noise. You have celebrated ten New Year’s Eves, worked out where the Christmas tree goes, and where the drinks and the buffet tables need to be, to ensure a good through flow of guests at a party. You made this the perfect family home.

But now it’s just you. And the boiler needs replacing and the roof needs a bit of attention, and dust collects in the spare room. Not the one you use for guests, the one you never use. The bills are as big as ever but there seems to be less money around to pay them. The thrill of sanding windowsills and skirting boards has somehow dissipated.

You find yourself looking at Homes and Gardens and House Beautiful, and marvelling at how ingenious people are with really small spaces. The many benefits of decluttering, as demonstrated by article after article by happy, dancing, freed spirits, are not lost on you. The weight of the contents of your cupboard under the stairs presses down on you. 

And so to Right Move. You know you want to. It becomes your new hobby. Candy Crush and Twitter take a back seat as you search and filter and type in ‘Orkneys’ and ‘Cornwall’. Just to see. And you are amazed by what you can get for the money in Hull or Newcastle and horrified by what you can't in Surrey or Sussex. You Zoopla your own house and see that it might be worth more than you thought. You get an agent in. And he sighs, and looks regretful and tells you that the market is a bit flat and he can’t get enough houses to meet demand in all the other price brackets, but yours, well, people just don't seem to be paying the prices at the moment. 

So he gives you a figure, and you are insulted on behalf of your house. And one afternoon you come home to find strangers standing in your bathroom saying to each other in loud voices that they would absolutely have to rip all that out and start again, and they couldn't live with your stair carpet. 

And you draw the curtains against the night and the draughts and the cobwebs in the corners and shut out all the people from outside who just don't appreciate the beauty of a real home. And you decide not to downsize just yet, and think that maybe you'll turn that second spare bedroom into an art studio. 

More of me and my house move soon.