How a home makeover healed my heart
There was a time when I’d come home from work in the dark winter months, walk into the kitchen, pre-lit by a lamp on a timer so I didn’t have to face the gloominess of the empty house, with radio 4 muttering quietly to the silence, sit down in the armchair — and just cry.
horrible crying, soul-searing crying, feeling despair — not just alone, but lost.
I was 55, my mother had died, my sister had moved to Scotland, my marriage had ended, my youngest child had gone to college, two others were off travelling on the other side of the world — one so remote she had no telephone or internet — and another had left home to live with his girlfriend. In a flash, it seemed, I’d lost everything. I was so lonely I felt I could die. elvis got it right.
I sat in that house, a shrine to the family, stuffed with memories, surrounded by the legacy of a life together, feeling like the forgotten relic of a bygone age — a disposable one.
Nobody would have guessed this. At the publisher where I worked, I kept it hidden. My sad little secret.
But what to do? In the end I couldn’t take it any more. I sat at my desk longing to go home, only to get there and wish I was back in the office. eventually, after months of crippling emptiness, I realised I had to embrace the reality of my so-called new life.
I couldn’t conjure a dozen friends from the back of a drawer, so I decided that if I had to be alone, I should at least be comfortable.
So,
I moved my ex’s things into a cupboard, found a new bed on eBay (a plush rococo folly), bought the most expensive high-thread-count sheets I could afford, painted the wall gold, and invested in a down bed topper, soft pillows and a duvet so light it was like sleeping on clouds (never was a comforter so aptly named).
I surrounded myself with books I’d longed to read, bought a breakfast tray with legs, and turned my bedroom into a cosy retreat — like a hotel with room service, courtesy of deliveries from the local sushi place.
Then I pulled up the stair carpet, site of a thousand accidents, including the time my daughter set it on fire, and painted the wood white with a pink stripe. My stairway to heaven.
And when this proved a less than perfect idea — gloss paint is slippery (visions of me dead at the bottom of the stairs unnoticed for days flashed through my head) — I painted them again, this time a totally impractical arctic white.
Best of all, I turned my ex’s office into my workshop. With a family of six in a four-bedroom house, this space had always been a sore point — but something he claimed he couldn’t live without.
I got an unheated cupboard with a window for a study; he got central heating and a view of the garden full of musty books in languages I couldn’t read. I’d always slightly resented him working there, uninterruptible unless the phone rang when I became his receptionist.
‘Pretend I’m not here,’ he’d say if I complained I found it hard having him home, yet unavailable. But now he really wasn’t. his sacrosanct study was, after all — like me — dispensible. And the room was up for grabs. So I grabbed it.
I moved his books to the attic and made him put others in storage when he claimed his new bachelor pad didn’t have room.
I cleared out his papers and bought shelf after shelf of kitsch china from antiques stalls on London’s Portobello road which I mean to use, one day, maybe.
Instead of a room I was afraid to enter, that held the ghost of his back turned towards me, his fingers tapping ‘go away’ in morse code on his laptop, I made it my own. I sat at his table and enjoyed his view. I got cats. he hated cats.
I didn’t go through my phone book calling people I’d met once a decade earlier at a party, take evening classes or invite round random strangers. Instead, room by room, I reclaimed space and made new memories.
I painted out the past with gallons of Annie Sloan, and covered the room with wallpaper. I gave him back his mother’s expensive, museum- quality Persian carpet, which I’d always hated, and the antique family heirloom needlepoint cushions, which I replaced for £50 from h&M. I bought fake fur rugs to keep me warm in front of the box sets I watched and turned the dining room table into a sweat shop for one — me — with sewing machines and piles of fabric. I didn’t even know how to sew. But I learnt.
My house became a sort of playroom for me. A whole sofa to loll on and a whole bed to roll in, a bathroom of my own, be it humble, with fluffy towels and a monogrammed bathrobe with fleecy lining bought from a hotel supplier in America.
If I felt like it, I made mosaics on the kitchen table or didn’t make my bed for a week. I got a greenhouse, grew tomatoes, put an awning in the garden under which I could read, listen to birds, and, on a cold night, light a fire.
My
ex would visit occasionally, look around the home he’d abandoned, and from which he’d been excised, and say: ‘ What a nice house you have.’ I’d agree and feel a twinge of pleasure that maybe he regretted something about leaving.
eventually, I came home to darkness and silence because I didn’t need the illusion of other people cluttering the place. My house became my friend instead of my enemy, a solace instead of a punishing reminder of all I’d lost.
It was, instead, a measure of all I’d gained. I sat with myself in a space I’d created for my own comfort and happiness, and eventually I was comforted. And happy.