Open House Read online

  Epigraph

  I would keep my place if I knew my place;

  things have never been that neat.

  —Graffiti on the wall of a Toronto home

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  1. The Acknowledged Catalyst

  2. The Foundation Is Set

  3. The Cornerstones

  4. The Hunt

  5. The Find

  6. The Unacknowledged Catalyst

  7. The Property Delusion

  8. The Keys

  9. The Victorian Terrace: Icon of an Empire

  10. The Preparation

  11. The Layers Revealed

  12. The Loos and Don’ts

  13. The Neighbourhood

  14. The Hamilton Homes

  15. The Surprise Visitor

  16. The Neighbours

  17. The Wake-up Call

  18. The Tea Station

  19. The Worrier-in-Chief

  20. The Project Tilts

  21. The Mind Tilts

  22. The Move

  23. The Flaws

  24. The Cost

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  The Acknowledged Catalyst

  I cannot live in our home anymore. We have to move.

  The Husband and I face one another at the security cordon of London’s Gatwick Airport. These words have not yet sprung from my lips; they remain in my head, though they have also spilled onto a missive, crafted in careful language, which is folded and tucked under my husband’s pillow at home. It awaits his patient reading and will demand his complete understanding and action. I am asking a lot of him, because unlike me he is a creature of routine and stability. He does not like change. He does not like moving. Less than two years earlier, I had promised him that this was it; that we would not move again for a very, very long time. But now that promise must be broken.

  Back when the promise was made it had been a reasonable, heartfelt one. We had just endured a level of home-buying stress that had all the bewildering confusion of a pantomime and none of the hilarity. England’s convoluted system of buying and selling houses is not built for gentle constitutions, which goes some way in explaining why Britons are one of the least mobile and most risk-averse cultures on earth.

  As a Canadian, I am made of hardier stuff: I enjoy moving house. No, let me rephrase that: I love moving house. I love the search for a new home, the packing up and the subsequent assessment and de-cluttering of all that I own, when old and new face off in a fight to survive the charity shop box. I love planning a new space, designing and styling the interior, thumbing through stacks of paint and fabric swatches. I love the ruminating, the budgeting, the logistical organization, the legal details involved in a title search. I have even grown to enjoy (with the exception of our last move) the chaos that is part and parcel of the moving experience.

  Statistics reveal that Britons move on average three times in a lifetime, Canadians about seven times, and Americans about eleven times. I, however, have moved thirty-two times.

  To some people, thirty-two house moves looks like recklessness; to me, thirty-two moves looks like life. And life is one big open house.

  A track record like that does not come without personal stock-taking. Here is one: I have had more homes than lovers, by a long shot. A virtuous statement, and one that I wear proudly. Thirty-two homes in sixty-three years works out to one home every second year. Would I trade that for a new lover every second year? Are you crazy? I could never maintain a sex life like that—I would be too bored. But while I am not sexually promiscuous, when it comes to homes I am a shameless, serial adulterer. I have cast a covetous eye over other homes in my neighbourhood. I have brassily walked up to a new neighbour and drawn him or her into such intimate conversation, twirling the ends of my hair around a painted fingernail, that within seconds I am purring my way into their home just to check the layout and decor. I have sat on the sofa in a home I have just moved into and immediately started swiping left and right on Rightmove or MLS. Sex toys? Forget it. But give me a pencil and a floor plan and, oh, baby, I can reach ecstasy before you can say “stud wall.”

  Second fact: I fall in love faster with a house than I do with a person. This I am not so proud of, because it probably puts me at the wrong end of the Asperger’s spectrum. Nevertheless, it is the God’s honest truth: I get more excited about meeting a new house than I do about meeting a new person. Perhaps that is true of most introverts. No tedious or awkward conversation required, no probing questions to circumvent. Does that make me cold-hearted? Indicate intimacy issues? Does it mean I relate better to buildings than humans? Does it look like I care?

  For their part, houses are not as obviously discriminating as people, but they size you up—oh yes, they do. They absolutely pass judgment on you. For that reason, I am always on my best behaviour when I meet a new house, especially one that is for sale. A house can smell desperation on a potential buyer as surely as you can smell damp on it. There have been times when I have been actually flustered, almost on a crush level, about visiting a particular house. I think a home can smell that, too. Where I draw the line about lusting after a house is when it is a friend’s: I never flirt with or fantasize about their homes. I will cheer their own plans, and gush about their decorating expertise, but I will not so much as tamper with the placement of a sofa cushion. Unless, that is, I am asked.

  Like lovers, houses can and do disappoint; on the outside they can be as sleek as a runway model, but on the inside they are vapid—a few radiators short of a heating system, if you know what I mean. The seasoned homebuyer deftly learns to separate the pretentious from the practical.

  That is not to say that I can’t easily be seduced by a house. My pulse quickens when my eyes land on something that I know was built for me. There are some that I have actually stalked—online and in person—and I have occupied pleasant hours gazing at photos of its interior online or in a realtor’s brochure, imagining the place decorated and arranged with my furniture, and me cuddled into it with the sort of happy contentment that puts an end to my roving eye. When the object of my affection falls into the hands of a real buyer, I have been known to become distraught and to tumble into a period of deep mourning.

  Buying a home has never frightened me or kept me up late at night; buying a car, yes; perhaps an item of clothing; but never a house. I am completely at home with homes in the same way people are at home with horses or recreational drugs. Nothing scares me about them. If a house intrigues me, and as long as a murder has not taken place in it, I can work with anything. Actually, if a murder has taken place in it, I will still look at the floor plan. I have been in houses where the layout was not appealing or where the scope and the result of a renovation would not produce enough of a satisfactory buzz, but I can pretty much look at anything and envision a spotless transformation. No floors? No problem. Leaky roof? Whatever. Dated and ugly bathroom? Piece of cake. My fantasies extend into that semi-masochist stratosphere of buying and renovating a home in a country where I do not speak the language. What a delicious thrill that would be. But I am not there yet, and I have accepted the fact that it is unlikely to happen. Not in this lifetime, anyway.

  The only time I have come close to swearing off houses is when the experience has been a nightmare, such as our last move. It was so nerve-racking that I vowed never to go through it again. More specifically, I vowed never again to put my husband through it. As The Husband will read in the note that lies waiting for him beneath his pillow: “I do not relish the idea of moving, either, but I am prepared to take it on because I am desperate. The combination of unbearable noise and
lack of natural light hampers my concentration. All the ideas and dreams I have when I am outside the house are crushed the moment I walk through the front door. This house is suffocating me.”

  Of course, he does not know any of that right now because we are at the airport. I am about to fly across the ocean for three weeks of work, which will give him time to digest my note and acclimatize to the idea of boxes, house hunts, and unforeseen costs. Of uprooting a settled life and starting over.

  It is only when he kisses me goodbye at the security gate that I tell him about the note under his pillow. I do not tell him about its contents.

  His face falls.

  “Don’t be upset,” I say. “You know me—I have to write out my thoughts in order to express myself clearly. I get tongue-tied when I try to talk to you about emotional things.”

  “Can you give me a hint what it’s about?” he asks, searching my face for clues concealed beneath a practised smile.

  I give him another kiss goodbye. “Just read it. We’ll talk about it when I return.”

  Now he looks on the verge of panic, eyes wide, jaw trembling ever so slightly.

  I reassure him with a wink. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’m not leaving you.”

  Once he reads that note he will wish I was.

  IF I HAD HAD AN INKLING during our seven-year transatlantic courtship of The Husband’s reticence about moving and about change in general, I would never have married him. It would not have been fair to either of us. I see moving as a natural, exciting adventure; he sees moving as a high-ranked indicator in the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory.

  The Husband is English through and through. He likes his Sunday roast, football, and tea or a pint in front of the fire. He likes the quiet life. His calm, easygoing demeanour belies the cautious, worrying type who lives behind the facade. He does not court chaos. He judges things by how they appear in front of him, not by what they can become. His approach veers toward the pessimistic, weighing the probability of disaster especially if he is about to purchase something big.

  He had lived in the same two-bedroom flat in northeast London for twenty-five years. It was the upper flat of a double-bayed Victorian semi-detached house on a tree-lined street of similar homes. It always frustrated me that the house was divided into upper and lower flats, and I often wondered how it might have looked had we bought the lower flat and returned the house to a single-family home.

  Until I arrived in his life, he had never had anything done to update his place. It looked like bad student digs, with mismatched charity furniture, faded magnolia walls, and bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, unsuccessfully masked with flimsy paper shades. I do not know where one even buys that sort of thing. The original state of the bathroom and kitchen do not merit description, but once renovated they looked very smart.

  When we married and I moved to England, it was a given that we would move to a larger place once he retired. He was keen to move, though in hindsight he might not have been keen to move away from Walthamstow. However, as London property prices soared and it became glaringly obvious that we were priced out of the market, he was as relieved as I was to leave the city.

  We could have moved anywhere in Britain, but we chose southwest England for its more reasonable weather and rugged coastal scenery. Our intensive weekend searches of Devon and Cornwall eventually brought us to the coastal town of Brixham, a place that attracted us. “Attracted” is not an entirely honest term. “Became infatuated to the point of obsession and losing all sense of the practical” is more like it, at least from my standpoint.

  Brixham lured us with its relaxed coastal vibe and its authenticity. It was a proper working fishing port, with fleets of trawlers chugging out to sea early each morning and returning by mid-afternoon, hulls heaving with mackerel, conger, whiting, cod, black bream, bass, mussels. Neither The Husband nor I was au fait with seafood, but we were eager to try it. Besides, there was more than fish here: there was the gentle whoosh of the surf; the parade of shops, pubs, restaurants, and ice cream kiosks; the replica of the Golden Hind. There were cheerfully painted terraced homes draped like strung beads in a multi-strand necklace around the collar of the harbour, where skiffs and sailboats bobbed in watery glitter. We had walked into a cliché and fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.

  The British seaside has long held an appeal for a certain type of retiree, but were we that certain type? Are you, dear reader? If, like me, you are a fan of cultural diversity, of year-round arts and street scenes, of cinemas, libraries, museums, art galleries, bookshops, live theatre, and fast trains to the city, then heed my words: avoid the seaside. It was only when we had finally moved to the Devon countryside that I detected a subtle but insidious campaign by social planners to nudge older people out of the cities and decant them to coastal geriatric ghettos. But by then, I was so high on love for Brixham that I did not care if such an edict had been mandated by a Russian oligarch.

  Usually, my well-honed intuition will kick in to save me from making a huge error in judgment, but it did not this time. Or if there was a kick, I likely misread it as a sign to buy the early nineteenth-century double-fronted stucco cottage we eventually fell for. It was the type of place where you expected to find Poldark leaning against the mantel with a glass of port, smouldering with lust. And I am not even a fan of Poldark.

  The front door opened into a small vestibule that in turn opened to a spacious room—to one side was the living area; to the other, separated by whitewashed beam work, was the dining area. It was all bleached wood, white walls, and tawny sisal carpeting. Behind this area was a kitchen that spanned the width of the house, and that came equipped with a Belfast sink and a large five-burner, three-oven range. A stable door led to a tiny courtyard that was dominated by what would have made an excellent climbing wall had we been rock climbers. From there, thirty-three precarious flagstone steps led up to the garden and its panoramic view of the town and harbour. We could see right across the bay to Torquay. Back inside the house, the two upper levels held four double-size bedrooms, two beautifully appointed and spacious bathrooms, and a storage room. It had more room than we needed, and aside from a bit of tweaking it required no work. A bonus was that the house was all of fifteen seconds from the harbour, the shops, pubs, and restaurants, and a fifteen-minute walk to the gorgeous, undulating Devonian coastline.

  I felt a sudden connection to the house, convinced that we had “lucked out.” The Husband had agreed only because he saw the joy it gave me: “Happy Wife, Happy Life,” as the saying goes. If he voiced any objection, I did not hear it. I was too smitten. The house had the trifecta of English charm: quaint, quirky, and cozy—catnip to anglophiles like me. I was the one who had anointed it the “perfect home,” the one who upon entering it for the first time had squealed, “Let’s put in an offer.” And the price? This beautiful, spacious house cost less than the cramped two-bedroom, gardenless flat we had just sold in London.

  Unusually—and prophetically—the estate agent for the property tried to talk us out of it, or at least tried to quell my enthusiasm. He had prudently suggested we look at nearby towns, where the culture and amenities were more suited to our personalities. I paid him no heed; did not even bother to visit the places he suggested, so confident was I in my heart’s desire. But I was wrong; he was right. There are times when other people—strangers, especially—can read you better than you can read yourself. Not long after we moved in, we visited the towns the estate agent had recommended, and I immediately regretted not having listened to him. To this day, I still troll property websites for homes in those same towns. As the adage goes, it really is about “location, location, location,” because on the days when your house wears you down, there is no place like town.

  We bought the Brixham house and moved in. It took our furniture easily. We painted, redid the kitchen; put in bookcases and a wood-burning stove in the living room. The house was entirely comfortable.

  When I would mention to friends that we had moved
to Devon, their mouths would drop, their shoulders would relax, their eyes would glaze with envy. “You lucky bastards,” they would say. When they visited us, their envy was confirmed: the house was “chocolate box,” the town’s laid-back lifestyle was idyllic. Even the weekend pirates who descended on the town in full Johnny Depp and growling “Arrrr” gave a bit of cheesy charm to the place. A walk up the high street, where I did my grocery shopping at the butcher’s and the green grocer’s, guaranteed a wave back from the merchants. I felt like the reborn Scrooge who became a friend to all. I got involved in my local church. Our neighbours were lovely. There were days when I had to pinch myself that I was living in this little slice of heaven.

  As for the house, it was like a rambunctious, eager-to-please Labrador, happy to be teased with paint colours and furniture arrangements, anything to save it from holiday-home hell and restore it to a permanent family home. Our talk became inclusive of the house, as in: “The house would look nice in this colour.” Or, “This would look great in the house.” Or, “Should we do this to the house?” Or, “If we go away, what should we do with the house?” In fact, the house became The House, as if it were an animated entity. When a gutter leaked like a dripping nose, we rushed to tend to it. Each month the window cleaner would arrive, and you could feel The House perk up as it welcomed the pampering. In the evenings, when The Husband and I snuggled on our sofa in front of the roaring fire, I could not help thinking that The House was relaxing, too, smiling benignly at its wonderful owners who coddled and loved it. It was like the third person in our marriage, and we were absolutely fine with that. I adored The House.

  And then I did not.

  Never have I fallen so completely and irrevocably out of love with a home as I did with this one. This loss of affection had nothing to do with The House itself: I would have happily picked it up and moved it elsewhere had that been possible. The problem was where it had been planted, and when the issue involves location, there is no option but to move. The pluses of the location, the ones of convenience that had seduced me, were many, but the few negatives carried more weight. We had viewed the house in February, which gave no clue to the tourist traffic nightmare that awaited us. At the first whiff of summer, cars and trucks whizzing past our front door became intolerable. Impatient drivers, caught up in the traffic-clotted narrow street, would lean on their horns and swear. Not the nice swearing, either, the sort done under the breath, but the bullying kind that spews the worst possible language at full bray. If it wasn’t the cars and their drivers, it was the motorbikes. From April to November, the town’s drug trade shifted into full gear, and numerous times an hour we endured the razor-like rip and whine of motorbikes gunning it back and forth as the dealers delivered their wares. A writer requires a certain level of quiet, though in my case not necessarily absolute silence: I can write with power drills and jackhammers in the background, but not with people swearing and motorbikes screaming.