Here is a short and by no means comprehensive list of things that have been at the bottom of my fruit bowl for about a year: two screwdrivers, a small plastic Pikachu, four marbles, the inner mechanism of a door handle, a drawing of a clown, an unidentified key, the receipt for our wedding wine and a pipe cleaner. Today, after at least 12 months of wishing someone would rid me of this troublesome shrapnel, I finally cleared out the bowl.
Why? An attack of efficiency? Is someone’s grandma coming to stay? Have I discovered a wealth of spare time? No. We are trying to sell our house.
There is a strange and particular grief to getting your house ready for sale that I can only liken to waking up on the day of a hairdressing appointment with absolutely perfect hair. Or the time that my first boyfriend gave me a bunch of roses just days before we broke up. Somehow, just as we are preparing to say goodbye to the old place, it has taken on an aspect, a vibe, even a light that is almost perfect. The afternoon sun on my dining table? Magic. The creaking floorboard at the top of the stairs? Musical. The roof ladder to the loft? Majestic. If the house wasn’t so small that my mum has to sleep in the shed with a bucket for a potty when she comes to stay, I would live here for ever.
The same was true when I was renting. As soon as we handed in our notice, the previously cramped, squalid, dingy hole I’d been thrashing about in suddenly became a haven of space, familiarity and gas hobs.
The reason for this rosy domestic glow isn’t nostalgia or regret or doubt. I’m not sure it’s really emotional at all. The bare fact is that, after three years of good intentions, we are finally doing all the jobs that have been screaming out to be addressed since the day we moved in: fixing the bathroom tap, clearing out the garden, painting the ceiling, putting doors on our wardrobe rather than just having a gaping maw of fabric chaos in the bedroom. At the prospect of potential buyers looking around our home, we have pulled our fingers out and actually changed the shower curtain.
It makes me wonder whether those of us with the great privilege of secure housing should just pretend to move every couple of years. Be forced to open those crawl spaces under the eaves and finally donate to charity the hobby horse, bread maker and pair of cowboy boots that have lain dormant up there for 18 months. Finish painting the skirting boards. Wash the windows, inside and out. I used to joke that I only invite people around to dinner to force myself to clean the kitchen, but the pressure of a deadline, even a false one, is often the only thing that will get me moving.
So, rather than spending hours at our desks, browsing property websites, feeling jealous about all the places that already got their act together, perhaps we could organise a sort of non-commercial open house a couple of times a decade and let the prospect of strangers poking around our cutlery drawers and bedroom cupboards galvanise us into action. For someone as incurably nosy as me, the opportunity to finally see what my neighbours’ bedding looks like would be well worth hiding my washing-up in the oven when my own turn comes around.
I wanted to end this column with an inspiring quote from a great thinker about change. Something like: “Wherever you go, go with all your heart!” – apparently said by Confucius, presumably as he was trying to work out how to transport a double mattress and an air fryer across Qufu without hiring a van. But I somehow ended up on a New York removals company website that had a section dedicated to sayings about moving, which made unlikely page-fellows of Richard Branson, bell hooks, Marc Jacobs and Harriet Tubman. So instead I’ll simply say: with matters of the heart, don’t wait until you’re leaving to bleach the grout in your shower.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
