MY HOUSE HATES ME

 

It was late May, and it was the hottest day of the year so far and I had the day off work which I should have been enjoying.

I should have been sitting on the patio beneath the clear blue sky with a cold beer and the newspaper but no.

Instead, I had spent the entirety of that beautiful May day in the car with my wife Roz, the hot sun burning my face through the windscreen and her constant wittering burning my ears.

The reason for wasting that beautiful day was the fact we were house hunting and the reason we had been at it all day seeing a succession of unsuitable properties was that we had different expectations of what our next home should be.

I very much liked the house we had just sold it met all our needs when we moved into it and we had had very happy times there, but our growing family meant we needed a bigger home which was a shame as we had the house and garden just how we liked it and we had really made our mark on the place.

I liked the look of the house the moment I saw it and it was in a location we liked and was on the right side of town for me getting to work and it was modern.

I liked modern, modern was good, modern was practical, modern was simple, modern was low maintenance.

I really loved that house, and I wanted the same again only bigger.

My wife on the other hand wanted character and apparently you only get character in a property when the people who built it are dead.

So, we kept looking and looking and looking.

It was late in the afternoon by the time we turned into the narrow road in the old part of town and pulled up to a stop at the kerbside.

Ahead of us the road split left and right and then the two roads turned at right angles and ran parallel to each other either side of a broad strip of grass about 25 to 30 yards wide and with a few mature trees at one end.

The two roads and the grass strip separated two long rows of pre-war semidetached houses that faced each other across the no man’s land in between.

Roz and I looked at each other and we both nodded agreement and we drove off in the direction of our objective which was about halfway down on the left-hand side.

We pulled up outside number 52 and I switched off the engine.

I looked around me and despite my favouring the modern I liked the situation very much it had a wide-open feel there was plenty of parking and somewhere for the kids to play and I had to concede that you wouldn’t have got space like that in a modern development.

Then I looked at the house and a feeling of foreboding came over me I don’t know if it was the flaking paintwork the pebble dash cladding the ill fitted windows or what looked like the original seventy-year-old guttering.

The sun was still hot and there was not a breath of wind blowing as we got out of the car and my mind wandered back to that cold beer that I wasn’t sat at home drinking.

I could tell by my wife’s demeanor as she stood looking at the house that she liked what she saw this was confirmed a moment later when she said “Its lovely isn’t it? Look it even has a happy face” I looked at it and only saw a sneer. I was spared having to comment by the arrival of the agent well dressed and oily like most of his ilk and deeply apologetic for his tardiness.

As we entered through the front door, I was sure I felt an icy chill come over me despite the heat of the day I should have taken that as a sign.

We stepped into the tight cramp hallway and Roz said obviously viewing it through rose tinted glasses “isn’t it light and airy”. I was not encouraged.

We had the full tour with the agent where he put a positive spin on every aspect of the property and my wife gushed “oh I love this” and “oh look now that’s what I mean by character” she got worse with each successive room we entered and where she saw charm, potential and character I saw only dingy, tatty and old.

I tried in vain to point out that the house we were viewing bore no resemblance to the one whose details she had gripped in her fist, but it was all to no avail and I knew my protestations were falling on deaf ears.

When we got out into the garden I couldn’t tell if the agent’s details exaggerated the dimensions or not as I couldn’t see the end of the garden not because it was particularly long but because it was so overgrown that I half expected a Japanese soldier to cut his way through the jungle and surrender to me.

Again, my poor deluded wife saw potential.

 

Next, we viewed the detached garage which was situated in the back garden but was accessed from the front of the house via the drive way at the side of the property.

My wife enthused at the sheer size of the tandem garage and how we could get both of our cars in it at the same time.

I pointed out that if she had an Austin A30 and I had a Ford Prefect we could indeed get both cars in the garage at the same time but that any car made after 1959, with the possible exception of the original shaped Mini or a Smart car wouldn’t get up the narrow drive.

She dismissed my points with a loud tutt and a hand gesture that said “whatever”.

I was fighting a losing battle and quite frankly I was losing the will to live to boot.

I knew there was nothing to be done as she had clearly fallen in love with the house.

 

On the way home in the car Roz went through her list of positives and disregarded my list of negatives and in closing she simply said you get more for your money with an older property we would have to pay another twenty thousand to get a modern house with that much space.

I didn’t even bother to point out that the reason you can get an older house for less than a modern one is that they cost so much to maintain.

Although we fundamentally disagreed on what constituted the right house, we did both agree that the situation was perfect and in the spirit of compromise we did acknowledge each other’s point of view taking fully on board each other’s pro’s and con’s.

Suffice is to say we bought the house

 

It was the middle of July when we moved in and the move from the old house went relatively well, as well as these things ever do at any rate then I arrived at the new house to find the meter reader from the electric company waiting on the doorstep.

As I took a box of essentials from the car, tea, coffee, kettle etc., I looked up at the house and it still appeared to be sneering.

I produced a door key that Roz had had cut that morning and much to my embarrassment it wouldn’t open the door.

It still wouldn’t open the door as the removal van pulled up nor 5 minutes later when the meter reader left in a huff after telling me she had more important things to do.

To add to my embarrassment five minutes after that Roz arrived took the key from my sweaty hand and opened the door first time.

I couldn’t believe it the removal men laughed behind their hands and I skulked into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

I took the lid off the kettle and put it under the tap then as I turned the tap on the whole thing came off in my hand spraying water all over me and half the kitchen.

My darling wife was less than sympathetic laughing at me in front of the removal men and serving me a large slice of tongue pie when we were alone.

There was a succession of minor irritants during the rest of the day the worst of which was that the boiler wouldn’t light which was apparently my fault because I was the only one in the house at the time.

The sofa wouldn’t fit through the hall, this was the same hall that she thought was light and airy and I thought was cramped, I decided to say nothing.

At the end of the day, I sat in the garden reviewing the events of the day and I was forced to conclude that the house remembered my hostility towards it and it had decided to make me suffer and over ten long years how I have suffered.

Every petty little job in the house has cost three times what it should have because each minor improvement we tried to make revealed previously unseen problems.

Now you might think that blaming this on the house is bordering on paranoia, but you didn’t have to experience it.

Whenever I was alone in the house the fabric of the building made noises it never normally made when other people were in the house they were like growls of disapproval and then the boiler would stop working or the electrics would trip and when I called an engineer out to investigate the problem, they could never find a cause.

Again, you might put this down to paranoia or an overactive imagination but the house’s malevolence towards me also took physical form.

The simple act of walking from one room to another became a trial because the door handles would snag on my clothes or catch on my pockets normally when I was carrying hot drinks.

Gutters would conveniently empty themselves just as I walked beneath them.

Invisible hazards would trip me on the stairs and cupboards and drawers would be open for me to wound varying parts of my body on when I was sure I had closed them.

But the worst of all was a low concrete beam in the garage on which I would always crack my head no matter how low I ducked, and my head bares the physical scars to prove it.

I tried once to tell my wife how much I hated the house and that I wanted to move but she loved the house so much and wouldn’t hear of it.

 

I have to accept now as I look back that I was totally irrational and that the house didn’t in fact hate me at all, but rather I hated the house.

Roz and I are divorced now and guess what I let her keep the house.