There's no place like home

‘Home'  — a simple word that means a million different things to a million different people. For some, it's the smell of a parent's cooking, headlights setting the front room aglow as your partner pulls into the driveway, or the sound of your dog's tail thwacking against the cupboards in excitement as you return home to them.

There’s an old adage that goes something along the lines of, ‘A house is made with walls and beams; a home is built with love and dreams’.  I’m fairly certain a plaque of this hung on our dining room wall at some point. I’m also fairly certain my mum purchased this sign in a bid to try and convince herself that our house was a home. The thing is, my stepdad’s been decorating my childhood home for 15 years. I'm using the term “decorating” lightly here — what I mean is, I knew to tread lightly down the stairs rather than pierce the soles of my feet on exposed carpet grip. I carefully avoided brushing my clothes against the walls to save them getting dusted with remnants of plaster; and if the odd kitchen tile or door handle fell off, it was no cause for alarm. This wasn't because it was going to be fixed. It's just the way things were.

The house became John's DIY project when I was around six years old, but it only really got underway when he decided to decorate our bedrooms five years later. At the time, eleven-year-old me was excited at the prospect of our house changing — like most children would be. I’d outgrown mine and my sister's shared lilac (her choice) bedroom, and I couldn't wait to paint it black (my choice). I didn't know that first, the entirety of our upstairs would be gutted, and I’d spend over a year waking up and banging my head on the dusty, newly plastered ceiling of my little brother's room that my sister and I were crammed into while he shared our parents' room. When my bedroom was eventually completed, it became my haven. It was the only place in the house I could retreat to that was free from protruding wires, nails, or dust. There was always so much dust. I didn't know that when I was double that age, John would still be finishing the house — again, I'm using this term ambiguously.

The upstairs makeover was the beginning and — much like the state of our house over the years — my timeline of the rest is quite muddled. One summer saw our kitchen appliances move into the middle of the room — a cement mixer among them — while the house was extended. My uncle Chris had been roped into the project at this point, and with him came his daughter and his dog. The house was chaotic, but my brothers, my sister, and I knew not to question it. We just got on with things. Sometime after the extension came the landscaping of the garden – at this point, we did challenge why it was important for us to have state-of-the-art decking and a fire pit when we didn't have carpet on the stairs, and our protests were met with the promise of exciting barbecues. John had other priorities, and barbecues were important to him, I guess.

There were slight improvements — eventually, our poky bathroom became a modern wet-room with a stand-alone bath. Granted, the boiler was broken, and you had to scream for someone to re-set it every two minutes in order to have a semi-warm shower, but at least it looked nice. Our boiler was broken for so long that eventually, I stopped mentally preparing myself for the icy blast and simply built up a tolerance. Sometimes, I'd come home to find that John had removed a door from its frame, or there was the time that my mum, my sister, and I returned from a holiday to find the living room wallpaper stripped off and the carpet ripped up. Mum battled him. He promised he would finish it. He offered to rent us a house elsewhere while he finished it. We carried on the way we were.

My mum moved out when I was 20 years old. A few months later, I went to Benicàssim Festival with my friends. When I came home, John was stood in a water-filled hole in the middle of what was once our living room floor, but had somehow become a muddy terrain; the exposed pipes revealed by the various craters were the only indicators that our house might actually be a house and not a swamp. By this point, I’d lived in John's building site for thirteen years. I was exasperated, but I can't say I was surprised. I took my suitcase upstairs (over the bridge John had fashioned out of wooden planks in the hallway for me) and went to bed. When I headed downstairs to get ready for work in the morning, John told me that the house beyond the living room (or what was left of it) was simply inaccessible, and that I’d have to spend the day upstairs. Since our bathroom was downstairs and I couldn't go to work in my un-showered, post-festival state, I told him he was being ridiculous — a perfectly proportional response to your stepdad standing in a trench at the foot of your stairs, suggesting you call your employer and explain you're taking the day off because of... what the hell was I supposed to even tell my manager? Eventually, I wore him down, he agreed to extend the aforementioned bridge to lead me through the swamp, and I got ready and left for work.

It’d be another year before I moved out. Somehow, I managed to write my dissertation at the dining room table, in the midst of it all. I divided a lot of my time between the houses of my boyfriend and my friends. Obviously, I enjoyed their company, but I also loved being in houses in which I could walk around barefoot without worrying about splinters, with living rooms that had the cosiness that bare brick walls and a floor that resembled pavement simply couldn't offer. When I visited my mum's new house for the first time since she and John split, I was filled with longing. Finally, a house that felt like a home — I’d be lying if I said this wasn't a significant factor in my reconciliation with my mum. Sure, our relationship called for a lot of work, but the house didn’t: it had carpet, wallpaper, skirting boards, painted units, and it was clean. It took me less than a month to make the decision to finally move out.

Just over a month ago, I moved into my first rented flat with my boyfriend, and I was positively euphoric – understandably more so than your average person — for us to have a place of our own. For the first couple of weeks, however, my elation was clouded by repeated nightmares in which I’d come home to find my boyfriend in our flat, only the rooms had morphed into my childhood home at its worst points: the dusty plastered walls, the exposed nails, the cement mixer, and the muddy ground. I’d wake up feeling robbed, and only settle once our bedroom features came into focus. I’m still prisoner to the urge to clean all my surroundings before I can relax because I can’t stand to live in anything close to mess, and I know not to begrudge my boyfriend for his occasional clutter since my own tidiness can border on obsessiveness; but I’m slowly learning that my home does not define me. It never did.