41. Moving On

I’ve moved house more than a dozen times so I should be used to it by now. Sometimes I’m ready and raring to go.  Bored of the same old bus route and tired of my job. Pensive but excited, to walk down streets unknown and explore new places. Meet people with strange voices and reinvent myself. Other times I dread it.

I love this little house we live in now. It’s the best place we’ve ever lived. I’ve got my own bathroom and a room of my own to potter around in. The light streams into the bedroom in the morning and creeps around the house so we have to shut the curtains for afternoon tv. Hedges and farmland mean happy, jumping little birds and lowing cattle. Foxes wake me. I pretend the road noise is the sea and imagine that beyond the hedge is a sandy path down to our own beach cove.

But the landlord wants to sell, before interest rates go up, so we have to go. By the time this story is posted, we will be gone. We will have a new house, closer to town, with wooden floors overlooking the school playing fields. Last year he told us we could stay as long as we wanted to and when we didn’t want to live here any more he would sell it. A month after Christmas, I got the call that he wants to sell, so we have to be out in two months. I’m trying not to hate him. I don’t even know him. I’m imagining the drunken conversation he had over the festive period where he was talked into it. “What, you’re making £500 profit every month when you could sell up and get £100,000 profit in one go? You’re a fool.” There’s nothing I can do. It’s business. It’s not my fault.

Some people have lots of boyfriends; I have lots of houses. The similarities are comparable. It’s always new and exciting, never perfect, I live with the flaws until I forget, or they always irritate. I stay until it’s over or get asked to leave, and then life is never the same again. Someone else gets the old house and I find another one. Hopefully, the last person has loved and cared for it and I feel safe there. This new house is not like the old one. That house was the love of my life. This is 55-65% compatible. But we have to be out soon and it’s the best I could find right here, right now.

I know what my family and friends will say when they visit. “Oh Norm, it’s lovely. Much bigger than the last house.”

So now I’m spending money on things I can’t see. For checks to see if I’m a worthy tenant, when I’ve been renting for over 20 years already. They get to hold on to half a months wages in case I spill something.

I’ll lose my built-in wardrobe so have to decide whether to buy a cheap Ikea flat-pack now, or live with a portable rail until I’ve saved up enough to spend six times the cost to get a solid wood one. I could just add to my Ikea Kallax collection and store everything in ‘Really Useful Storage’ boxes for the foreseeable future.

By the time you read this I will have already moved in. I’ve been writing it for weeks, as I felt the changing emotions. One thing I never thought about was just how old I feel now. I cannot lift and carry as much as I used to. My lack of strength and stamina shocked me.

I’ve definitely had ‘renter’s regret’ and this has cost me more than my entire holiday fund for this year. So no trip abroad for us for the foreseeable future.

The sense of loss is worse that a break-up. I know this is the best house in the area for our budget at the time we were looking. It’s just not even close to perfect. I need to accept this and make it my home, and stop looking on RightMove at better houses that weren’t even available at the time we were looking.

I do know now that wooden floors are cold and noisy.