The House: Part I

As part of this blog, I'll be creating a serialised history of our love/hate affair with our home. We bought our current house 8 years ago, at which time it consisted of walls, roof, a baffling labyrinth of rooms and external doors but no internal connections, and a field of chest-high grass. Two of the rooms had been occupied as living space up until approximately 50 years previously, the remainder were rammed from (mostly rotten) floor to ceiling with obsolete furniture, machinery and assorted junk.

One of the "habitable" rooms

Sweet dreams!!

We fell in love with the location (3 minutes from our office) and the extraordinary views ... there wasn't an awful lot else to fall in love with.

The view that did for us

Well, the first step was to buy the sleeping beauty. Actually, we hadn't really intended to sell our previous house: we had started our business in April that year and I had set up what was in those days a very swish website. The only problem was, we had a sum total of five houses on our books to sell. So, to pad it out a bit, we stuck our own on there as well. Then we made the mistake of letting one of our customers see inside it. In spite of our strenuous efforts to sell him something else, he point blank refused to be deflected from ours and before we knew it, contracts were signed. This was in May. He wanted to be in for summer and I was expecting our baby in September.

Unfortunately, the house we were to buy was part of an estate in liquidation, so the sale needed to be approved by a judge and would take longer than usual. Then events took over and I started having serious complications with the pregnancy. I was hospitalised and the baby delivered by emergency c-section on 6th August. During the month I was in hospital, we became homeless. Babe and I eventually emerged from hospital to a local gite which hubby had managed to rent.

The gite was pretty basic and all our belongings were in storage, but the notaire assured us it should be sorted out within a couple of months, so we felt we could bear it. However, September passed to October, November, and we were still there, with woefully inadequate heating and water pouring under the front door every time it rained.

I have to say, it was far from ideal introduction to motherhood. After a long, miserable winter, we eventually got the purchase completed at the end of March. Then the real fun started!

Our new sitting room