Thursday 27 August 2009

A chance to be nosey!

Over the years we’ve moved house quite a lot. The house we live in now is the one that we’ve lived in for the longest - 6 years. We went through a phase of moving every 9-12 months for a while so this is the 9th house we’ve lived in.

I regularly check on Right Move to see if any of our old places are up for sale - the last house we lived in resold a couple of years ago. But I was on there last night and was quite pleased to see this one. It’s the one we lived in for the shortest time, less than two months, but it’s the one where Ellie was born.

It’s changed a lot since then, the master bedroom didn’t have the patio doors and the bed was against the wall adjacent to the window. The current owners have added the balcony and patio doors. The en-suite bathroom was an awful burgundy colour and the kitchen was dark brown but was huge. Admittedly there is a lot of sadness associated with the house for me. I was very depressed at the time, Craig was working in Amsterdam (I went into labour with Ellie an hour after the last plane left Schipol so he missed her birth) and it was the time that I decided to cut off contact with my mother. It was February so my memories are of dark, damp days, feeling very lonely, and as I didn’t drive I was dependent on public transport.

That’s why we lived there for such a short time, because it was so awful. The fact the landlords would come round and look into the windows didn’t help, and the house was filthy, our feet would be black just from walking on the carpets.

The details mention a raised lawn - actually it was on a steep hill. The field in photo number 16 was actually almost level with the top floor windows!! The house looks so much nicer now, I can’t believe how much it is up for sale for though.

The room they use as a front sitting room was the dining room, their dining room was a games room complete with snooker table (not nearly as grand as it sounds!) and the office was another sitting room but because they were on the bottom floor we never used them and they had a kind of damp, isolated feeling to them.

I also found another couple of houses on there that were interesting to me - one is next door to one of the other houses we lived in (you can just see it on the photos) and the other one is next door to my Aunt’s old house where I spent a lot of my childhood.

Is it just me that keeps an eye out for their previous homes???

1 comment:

Pippa said...

Oh no, I check up my old houses too! Our first house is currently on the market, it was just a little two-bed terrace and that's where we lived when our first three children were born. By the time we left, it was sooooo cramped! It has changed hands a couple of times since and the garden is always described as "in need of maintenance" - what they mean is that I planted too many healthy, native trees!!

I know what you mean about places reminding you of good or bad times, it's hard to disassociate them with how you felt at the time.