There’s more to the place you call home than bricks and mortar alone. A house is made of memories and shared experiences that turn it into something special. By Jennifer Leppington-Clark
“I always thought of myself as a house. I was always what I lived in. It didn’t need to be big; it didn’t even need to be beautiful; it just needed to be mine.” – George Monroe: My Life as a House.
In my experience, this is indeed the case. Each time I moved house it coincided with a moment of change in my life.
In my adult life I have built, rented and bought houses, flats and garden cottages. Each structure seemed to be as much a representation as a container for my life.
When I look back at each time I made a physical move, it mirrored an equally significant emotional move in my life.
The house I built, I built with my partner at the time. It was one of those lengthy projects that took a lot longer than the builder told us. Should I really have been surprised?
I loved every inch of that house. I knew it almost better than I knew myself, because we spent so much time discussing exactly where we wanted each light switch to go and exactly how many we wanted per room. And the kitchen… it was my dream kitchen! I love to cook and so being able to pick all of the finishes, the perfect-size oven and design the cupboard spaces was a treat. The house was so full of potential and planning and shared dreams.
It also held some difficult times. It was while living in this house that my mum passed away after a long battle with cancer. It was also a house that I had to leave behind when my relationship with my partner ended.
Leaving the house I’d been so intimately involved in creating was almost as hard as leaving the relationship. Both had held such promise for a future built together.
But life changes and in spite of our best interests, it moves on.
After the break up and my mum’s death I was feeling completely lost and alone. She was my rock and my anchor, my safe space. So it should come as no surprise that I ended up renting a small garden cottage that offered me literal and figurative security.
The cottage was a place to regroup and I was very lucky to have caring landlords. They helped with the little things like hanging my pictures for me, helping to jumpstart the car on the cold mornings and even removing a giant spider that was languishing on the ceiling above my bed one night. I didn’t stay long, just a year, but it was exactly what I needed.
My next move was to my own flat. My home. My space. Well, the bank really owned it, but I spent a fantastic few years fixing it up, buying furniture, building a new life. What I really loved about the flat was that it was a blank canvas I could put my mark on.
There were no lengthy negotiations about colour choice with a partner (I even painted one feature wall a dramatic orange) and no rules about what I could and couldn’t change. So the turquoise carpets came up, the walls were repainted in a creamy colour called Sailcloth (except for the orange one) and I spent many an hour trawling the décor shops and the African craft market to find just the right pieces.
As my home took shape, I found new opportunities in my career and started a new, committed relationship.
This relationship developed to the point where we decided we wanted to set up a home together. And so the process of finding that perfect combined living space began.
At first we rented.
We found a beautiful open plan home in Linden that had natural stone tiles, an open fireplace and a huge patio for entertaining. Weekends were spent clearing weed-filled beds and nurturing a vegetable garden. Home-grown tomatoes, butternut, spinach and sugar snap peas were regular ingredients in the lunches we hosted for friends.
And then after finding that we really did enjoy living together, and because it made more sense financially, we bought a house.
After living in the open plan house – where no doors equals freezing cold winters, despite the fireplace – we wanted something more compartmentalised. Just seven days after first seeing the house, we made an offer. The house is double story and has just the right amount of rooms for our needs. We also gained a beautiful well-established garden where something is always flowering . This house, like the flat, needed some TLC and we’ve been slowly revamping it to make it ours.
We’ve just celebrated two years in our house, with our family of two dogs and a cat. I hope to celebrate many more in this home that we have made.
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