What Katie did next... It can be tricky decorating a 17th-century cottage when you have Liberace’s taste…
Collecting her things from storage in London sees Katie Glass making some bold decisions
It’s dark when I leave Somerset, feeling my way through the garden to the car, setting off along dark lanes, to meet the removal van in London. I had planned, somewhat ambitiously, to move all my things myself in a triumphant feminist gesture, Thelma and Louise meets the Chuckle Brothers, speeding down the motorway in an Enterprise getaway vehicle, but after I’ve calculated both the cost of hiring the van, and the likelihood of dinking it on the drive back, I decide to pay two men with a van to move me instead.
I drive to London, Stringerbelle woofing angrily in the back, retracing the drive I took a year ago without her. Then, I was leaving my home in the city. Now, I am surprised at how alien it feels. Shops have already changed hands on once familiar streets. The traffic is hellish. I sit in gridlock, thinking I don’t miss the city.
There is far more in storage than I remember, although it’s worth disappointingly less than the hundreds I’ve spent keeping it there while I’ve faffed about house-hunting. I am almost embarrassed checking out in case someone on reception says: “Oh, you’re the owner of unit 235? We thought you were dead!”
It’s late evening by the time I’m unpacking in Somerset, with my friend Nick. He’s known me since I was 17 and I’ve lived with him several times over the years, so he recognises most of my stuff. We pluck things from boxes, laughing at old photos and about how I’ve packed an Elle magazine from 2015 and an empty wine bottle. I remember how frantically I’d left during lockdown, leaving my fiancé, with no idea where I’d end up.
My things nestle into my new cottage as though they already belong. The silly fake moose head, cartoonish in London, perches perfectly over the fireplace. My rose bedspread lies prettily over my bed, like a cottage-core magazine spread. Only my black funeral march of city clothes in the wardrobe look out of place.
Other than a few things that I’ve accidentally taken that belonged to the ex (a massive television and some terrible art), I’m surprised by how distinctive my things feel, as if our lives never mixed. Here are my Frida Kahlo sofa cushions; a bedspread from when I took the train along the Silk Road to Uzbekistan; photographs from features I worked on, blown up by photographer friends; my pink record player. I unwrap them excitedly, like a second Christmas, spreading them around the house, displaying pieces of myself.
When it’s all unpacked, I’m surprised both by how much c--p I’ve got and how little furniture. Everything I owned in London was trinkets – boxes of old birthday cards, gold teapots, an ashtray in the shape of a peacock, a giant pine cone, a framed Charlie Hebdo magazine – and what is now apparent is that I don’t have many things to sit on.
I’ve moved from a one-bedroom flat in Dalston – so small that my friend Rob called it “the cupboard” – to a house with a kitchen the size of my old flat. Whole rooms sit empty. I use boxes as chairs and tables, having tea on them like Matilda’s Miss Honey. I don’t have a kitchen table, armchairs, curtains, bedside lamps or even a vacuum cleaner, which is a nightmare, given I have a black dog and cream carpets. How the previous owners managed to keep it pristine for 30 years is a mystery.
And so, although I planned to save my money for practical things, I find myself in the nightmarish position of having to go shopping.
It’s hard creating a World of Interiors look on a British Heart Foundation budget, but I’m pleased with my ability to hunt out bargains: raiding Facebook Marketplace, scouring eBay and searching charity shops. I enjoy going out each morning with a list of things I need and challenging myself to find them for as close to free as possible. I spend evenings combing Facebook Marketplace, where people list things they’re selling for next to nothing or are giving away, presumably because it costs less to get me to come and collect them than paying the tip to take them away.
I pick up fabulous pieces of furniture that people are throwing out, hopping in the car at a moment’s notice to collect an old wooden bureau from Frome, a farmhouse table from Devizes, a white Lloyd Loom bedroom set from Bath and a pair of green armchairs from Wincanton.
I buy things I’ve spent the past year dreaming of filling my cottage with, such as a vast pine dresser about which a man in Bristol, who arrives at a garage on his motorbike, says with a shrug: “You can have it for fifty quid.” Nick and I ram it into my boot, Nick clinging onto it as we weave precariously up and down hills taking it home, Stringerbelle woofing at the rumble in the back.
My best find is a giant green cord snuggle chair, so ugly that my friend Martin, who has come down from London to help me sort out the new house, gasps as it’s pulled through the door by two men apparently desperate to give it away. “Did they pay you to take this?” Martin says cattily. But once he, I and both of our dogs are squashed into it together in the kitchen, we never want to get up again.
I find a second-hand dishwasher and washing machine in the local Dorothy House charity shop, which Martin plumbs in. Without Martin there would be no house. He is not just my therapist but my Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen (with taste), capable of knocking a kitchen into shape in 30 minutes, like he’s doing a Changing Rooms challenge.
Together, we rip up the cream carpets, hunting for flagstones (sadly, there are none), replacing the flooring with seagrass rugs. He knocks out the kitchen cupboards one morning while I’m having a lie-in and we start hunting for free-standing sideboards.
At times, it is tricky decorating a 17thcentury cottage when I have Liberace’s taste. There was more rococo in my London flat than Barbara Cartland could have stomached. Luckily, now Martin is here holding me back, shouting “Don’t go crazy” as I disappear into auction rooms, stopping my hand in Homebase when I reach for the gold radiator paint (I buy it anyway).
I snap up two large ruby red sofas for the living room and convince Martin I should paint the plaster walls deep oxblood red. Candlelit, the velvety room transforms into a womblike opium den.
The end results aren’t perfect. But then neither is the cottage, which is what I love about it. Walls bulge, floors creak, old beams sit so low that Martin (6ft 1in) walks around shouting “Ouch!”
“You can never date anyone tall again,” he winks, as he heads off to Westcombe to hook up with a dairy farmer he’s met. “Bring some cheese back!” I shout as he disappears, because Westcombe has the best cheese shop in Somerset. Is this my life now – watching Martin date while I eat cheese on the snuggle chair? After a year on the road, I’ve earned it.