Selling up

I’m selling my home.  It’s a case of having to.  Financially I cannot hold onto it anymore.  It is the house I have lived in for the first 23 years of my life and the latter 14.  It’s been in my family for over fifty years.

The prospective sellers instructed a surveyor to come around to check the property over yesterday, probably with a mind to knock me down a few more thousand pounds.

When the surveyor asked me how long I had lived in the house and I told him my family had lived there for around fifty years he asked me is that when the house was built! Well to me it is glaringly obvious the house is old, very old and that didn’t instill in me the greatest faith in this surveyor. When he went around doing his business it felt to me like he was prying trying to find fault with my lovely house and that annoyed and upset me.

What would he see?  I can guess he would see the tile that needs replacing on the slated roof.  He would probably also notice that the wiring would need updating after circuit upon circuit was added when the house was extended bit by bit to meet the needs of a growing family.

I bet he’d notice that the dining room ceiling had little damp spots where the water would run through from the above shower if the kids didn’t put the shower curtain in place properly when languishing idly in the shower not washing but just standing under the hot water.

He probably noticed that the loft still housed the original roof which my Dad didn’t bother knocking down when he raised the roof, after all it added more insulation.

I wonder though if he noticed the loving and charismatic feel of the cottage.  The feel of welcoming arms holding you and drawing you into its lovely atmosphere?  I wonder if he’d notice the old wooden beams and that my Dad had painstakingly added an additional beam between every existing one chipping each strip of wood by hand to resemble the older ones.  Would he notice the wooden windows which I helped my Dad to make and fit. Each handmade and not quite the same as the other.  I wonder if he’d notice that one of the children had written ‘Dewi can’t see this’ high above a shelf in crayon (Dewi being my youngest and therefore smallest at the time) and I didn’t have the heart to paint over.  I wonder if he’d notice that in the upstairs bedroom the tiny piece of wallpaper I left behind the fitted wardrobe was the wallpaper on the room when my Aunty and Uncle lived there before my Mum and Dad?

Would he notice the big old stone fireplace with hooks to hang on the meat that we discovered behind a piece of ply?  Would he notice that the wood going up the stairs was original shiplap from boats and placed there in the 18th Century.

Would he know that visitors to the house would always comment on ‘the lovely feel’ of the house. Would he know that I once had a book dedicated to my house called ‘One for Rose Cottage’?  Would he know that old school friends still want to come back to visit just to see the house?

I doubt it.  I can imagine that he would just see work that needs to be done and hundreds or maybe thousands that could be knocked off the agreed the selling price.  

So prospective buyers when you come back to me with your multi-paged extensive surveyors report asking for a reduction in the price, I will tell you I won’t be dropping the price for any additional work required because as far as I’m concerned you are getting more than bricks and mortar for your money.  You are getting a house with a heart and soul……….. and that’s pretty much priceless!

And she’s off!

Last week I said goodbye to my daughter Bethan as she flew off to Dubai to start her new life.  Little did I realise when she was growing up that it would be so easy for me to let her go. Okay I suppose I really let her go the day she started University.  I knew then that things would change and that my little girl was flying the nest.

Me, Beth and her Dad at her graduation.

Now 5 years later she is leaving for another country and I’m happy for her.  Me?  The clingy, neurotic, worrying Mum she would despair of for phoning countless times on her teenage nights out to check she was okay. The Mum who drove around Tenby trying to find her when she didn’t answer her phone.  Me?  The mum who took her to hospital not once but twice when she was so drunk she couldn’t talk or walk when other mothers would have put their offspring in a cold shower and laughed it off in the morning.

And now here I am waving her off albeit a little tearfully to Dubai.  Of course, there’s Skype.  What a wonderful invention.  I can talk to her when she’s sitting in her hotel bedroom eating her pot noodle and talk about her day and it’s as if we are in the same room.  

Then of course there’s the month I’m planning to spend with her in January.  Boy, will she be sick of me then!   Though I’m not completely over my neurosis, when she didn’t respond even though Facebook said she was active on landing in Dubai I did think she had been abducted, mugged or worse and spent a fraught hour waiting for a message.  (Should never have watched Taken!)  But at the end of the day I am a Mum and that comes with the territory.

But all in all I’m happy for her.  Proud of her too, obviously.  But what a life she will have. London for all its glamour seems like a third world country compared to Dubai. Horrendous journeys on the train and tube to work, we wouldn’t treat animals like that.  Now it’s brunch at the Ivy, volley ball on the beach after work in November,and they have Bentley’s for taxis.  Now come on…..that takes some beating!

Dubai Marina

Good on you Beth!  If I was twenty years younger……….but then at that time I was far too busy being a neurotic mother!

Me and Bethan