Friday 13th November (moving house)

NON-WORKING DAY in the Outlook calendar

I get Fridays off since my company had to cut staff pay because of Covid-19. Although it’s a good thing for me today because I am moving house!

During the week I boxed up all of my belongings, carefully un-hung pictures from the wall and wrapped them in clothes, so they were less likely to break. I loudly peeled brown tape off the roll and fastened cardboard packages in between headset meetings and Excel formulae frustrations. The sense of relief I felt when I put my ancient work desktop in a box and taped it shut was telling. 

It’s a really odd experience waiting to move into a house (that my boyfriend purchased, so by proxy is our house) when you’ve never owned a place before. The Offer was accepted in the Spring, the Exchange was promised for the end of September, then pushed-back to October and finally in November it happens. All of a sudden, which is why it feels a bit out-of-place, like when you steel yourself for a big non-event. Friday 13th at 2pm is the Completion.

‘What does that mean?’ 

‘It’s when we get the keys! And all the money for the house that I sent to Tim [the lawyer] has been completely transferred to the sellers.’

‘All that money. Gone.’

‘In exchange for a house.’

‘A whole house!’ 

Friday comes and I am ready. Too ready. I have nothing to do until I meet A in Woolwich for the 2pm deadline. I also have no stuff to distract myself with because they are all in boxes. 

I take my yellow rucksack holding my essentials (wallet, phone, keys* – though not the correct ones. *Do you ever leave the house with the wrong keys for your house? There must be a riddle in there somewhere…) plus toiletries and a change of clothes; under one arm my yoga mat, under the other a sleeping bag. Tonight, we stake out the new house expecting all manner of disasters to befall us upon collecting the keys e.g. the previous tenants are still there, or it’s unliveable due to flooding/swarm of locusts/etc. 

It’s one of those mild November afternoons with a mixture of rain and sunshine. I catch the DLR to Greenwich then a train to Woolwich, heading on foot to Europe’s largest Tesco in the town centre, where I’ll rendezvous with my lover to walk into our new house. What a sentence. But first, before we do probably the most exciting thing of our lives, we push a trolley around Tesco buying cleaning products and the most humdrum stuff. A family size pack of pasta, eggs, dustpan and brush, olive oil, cooking oil, table salt. I realise while pushing the trolley down the tea aisle asking A, ‘What coffee do you drink?’ that this may be the last time I ask such questions. I ask him, ‘What milk do you normally get?’ ‘Green top organic.’ ‘Cool, me too.’ I believe we live pretty similar lives, so there’s no need for trepidation, it is mainly amusement at this point that soon we will just be drinking the same coffee apropos of living together. It’s also not like he isn’t allowed to change his habits and start drinking oat milk, I don’t think I would care – but as a live-in partner you might care, or at least be aware that a change in milk drinking habits may portent a bigger shift in temperament or political views. 

Two o’clock. We are walking down a busy road to the estate agents. We walk past the house which is soon to be ours along the way. It looks like a brick-and-mortar house, that’s good, glad we got that right in the first and only ever inspection we made of it, which lasted around twenty minutes. House-viewing is like the most high-stakes speed dating! 

The estate agents are closed (because of covid) but we ring the bell, and someone comes to answer the door. A tells them what we’re here for and she asks him to show his ID through the half-open doorway. Once that’s done, she asks us to wait a minute and then Spencer, who looks and smiles just like an estate agent greets us. He hands us a wad of keys and says have a good time. Simple as that. We walk back over a little park and a flock of pigeons flash mob us and then we’re home.

Getting a key to turn in a lock that’s not familiar to us takes several attempts. I’m a bit worried the keys don’t work. What a stupid view to take when you’ve been handed a set of completely foreign keys to blame the keys for not being able to open a door they’ve been opening for years. Of course, the keys work after our tenth try, then I hop over the threshold. We’re in!

The house is clean to they eye. The sellers left us their lawn mower in pride of place in the middle of the living room, as they’d stated they would in the List of Contents. The rest of the house is pretty amazing. Without the furniture and decorations of the previous owners the features speak for themselves. I never noticed that above the front doorway there was Victorian plasterwork. Or how the two fireplaces have very distinctive colours, almost like characters who are introducing themselves to you as a couple, but with very individual tastes. One is a deep blue and the other a burnished green, like ocean and earth or something complimentary, like wine and beer. I had wanted to paint the living room dark green, and A had wanted to paint the dining room blue after the Offer was accepted, and I only realised now that the fireplaces had persuaded us to do so, tactfully. 

The bathroom is not as tacky as I remembered. The walls are not covered in 00s mosaics, but tiny translucent blue glass tiles – it sounds like the same thing, but I promise you it’s not. We opened the veranda doors and could not get them to close properly again. We flicked on and off the wrong light switches waiting for things to turn on that didn’t, but other things did. It was like meeting someone you find fascinating for the first time.

***

That same day, we unloaded all of A’s family’s hand-me-down furniture. Four dark wooden block chairs with rattan seats, one Ercol chair with much varnish worn off, and nested tables with glass tops. There was one beautiful dark wooden coffee table with a story to go with it. When A’s mum Jeanette was a little girl her most favourite thing was her pen knife, and her mother’s most prized possession was this dark wooden coffee table. The two of them were talking one day around the coffee table, when Jeanette who was playing with her pen knife dropped it and it went slicing through the air and hit her mother’s table. Both of them looked on in shock. Jeanette felt sick with guilt. Her mother stayed silent for too long. The mother broke the silence by stating solemnly, ‘I saw what happened and it was an accident. And I bet you feel very guilty about it, so I won’t be angry with you.’ And for sure, when I stroke the surface of the coffee table, I can make out a clean nick. 

In the fading light of the afternoon, we manage to lock all the doors and drive over Blackheath to where I used to live. Luckily, we find a parking spot right in front of the house. As we load up my boxes into the large car, Alex comes out to help us do the heavy lifting. He is the most helpful man on earth and when we leave, he gives me an un-used paint roller, two paint brushes and a paint tray. It’s appreciated because we’re going to be painting the front room this week. I say goodbye to my old room, but I leave my bicycle behind, so I can come back and ride it home when it’s not raining. Of course, I feel a twinge of sadness to be leaving the House of Abundance, but my old room is in good hands, an OG is moving into it and when I return, it will look like a soulful club with dim lighting and swathes of vinyl records patterning the floorspace, and this will fill me with content.