Once everyone had gone to bed, I devoured the pages, attempting to wrestle them into some sort of order. What struck me was how familiar it all felt: here was someone, decades before me, falling for the same wonky old house and grappling with its peculiarities, builders, budgets and the practical limitations of Tudor architecture.
Describing seeing the house for the first time, ‘a quarter of a century ago (one-seventeenth part of its long life)’, the author writes: ‘my heart climbed all the excrescences with which the years (particularly the latter ones) had disguised it, and embraced its inherent worth and charm.’
From there, the parallels become almost comical: battles with roofs, floors and fireplaces; furniture bought for a song and made to fit; and the eternal tussle between preserving an old house and actually being able to live in it. Even our nemesis, the staircase, makes an appearance. ‘You hit the snag at the top,’ the author writes of the steep Sussex roof cutting off the turn. Precisely the snag that defeated our removal men on moving day.
‘The study-cum-drawing room was easily my least favourite when we moved in.’
What I loved most, though, was hearing how the house slowly came together. Furniture was gathered from auctions and jumble sales, mixed with inherited pieces and improbable bargains: a Victorian work table for 30 shillings, a chair for ten. Decades later, it turns out we’ve been furnishing it in much the same way.
The study-cum-drawing room was easily my least favourite when we moved in. For months it was essentially a holding pen for boxes and, with its bare brick floor and gloomy lighting, hardly invited you to settle in. Slowly, though, it has worked its way up the rankings to become one of my favourite rooms.
Annabelle in her kitchen: ‘For all the hard work, it’s easy to forget how far we’ve come.’
Very little was actually bought for it. The desk began life as my grandmother-in-law’s dressing table, while the bookcase is another old family piece. I found an antique chair covered in Sanderson’s ‘Little Chelsea’ on eBay for the frankly ridiculous sum of £60, while an old glass table from Natalia Violet Antiques is now softened by a vintage tablecloth, another eBay find. A custom-made rattan rug from India has finally taken the chill off the brick floor and a new Pooky lampshade has given an old floor lamp from our London flat another lease of life.