A house, house. Not a semi-detached unit. Or a cluster. Or a townhouse. Or a duplex.
A big, sprawling English cottage in our suburb with a tangled garden filled with purple hydrangeas and creepers wrapped around the gutters.
I don’t care if the inside of the house isn’t worth Instagraming every time I buy new scatter cushions (for our second-hand couches). I don’t care if the paint is flaking off the walls and the whole kitchen needs to be ripped out.
No really, if you’ve seen our townhouse, you’d know I really don’t care.
I yearn for the day when we don’t share a wall with a neighbour, and we can’t hear her TV set blaring at night. I don’t even mind her TV being so loud, because it means that she probably can’t hear the racket my three boys make. But I do mind knowing that the only thing that separates us is two layers of brick and a lick of paint.
How I DETEST complex living, with its busy-body corporates and its yapping poodles and its “I’m just letting myself into your back yard to take a meter reading” and ducking behind the chest of drawers when I’m getting dressed upstairs in case unit No. 7 across the driveway sees my boobs.
I want each of my kids to have their own bedroom where they can read picture books in the sunshine streaming in from big windows with no security bars. I’ll even fork out to install that fake wooden flooring, with a fluffy rug and dinosaur cushions that go ‘Roar’ when you sit on them.
Enough space to build Scalextric tracks and Lego cities and houses of cards. Rugs and blankies and old cushions that smell a bit like mothballs cause they come from the 70s. Put your feet up, put your nose in a book, go skinny dipping in your imagination while the sun traces a path across the blue skies unnoticed. Sophie the Labrador: a blonde streak in the back yard as she chases birds and bunnies.
A home. A home that’s ours alone. A home where the walls keep out the 40-hour work week. Where emails and tweets and likes bounce off a force field surrounding the property.
I’m 15 years into my career, and well into my 30s. I feel like I’ve been chasing this dream forever, like it’s a golden carrot dangling just in front of my nose. If I’ll just work a little harder, if I just come up with something a bit smarter, I can bust us out of this pokey townhouse.
Sometimes when I am driving through a neighbourhood and spot a home I like the look of that is for sale, I go online and stalk them on property websites and imagine our furniture in it. I don’t phone the agent or anything, because I know no matter what it costs, we can’t afford it right now.
I’m not there yet.
So until then I snatch another 15 mins for myself and dream of…
Books piled to the ceiling. Books, books, books in every room, as many as I can hoard in a lifetime. Like a fat-bottomed Womble with literary inclinations.
Thick, pastel-coloured pottery mugs with steaming hot chocolate and plates of Ouma’s soetkoekies baked by the dozen and stored in enormous Tupperwares in my walk-in pantry.
The sound of swallows building their nests in the trees outside; and not an electric fence in sight.
This post was originally published on Stacey’s Living Lionheart-blog. You can visit the blog here.
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