Our House

I'm tired today - you want to know why? Because I am so excited about our new loft bedroom that I can't sleep properly in it! Childish? Yes, very. But if you knew the blood,sweat and tears that have occurred over the completion of our loft conversion, you'd be excited too. It's all so glamorous up there at the moment - like a little oasis away from the noise of the rest of the house. And because we live in the city, we were short on views. But not anymore. Now, up in my lovely bedroom I can see over the rooftops to the purple Cheviot Hills beyond, the spidery wind turbines on the hills in County Durham as well as across the mosaic of the city itself.

Our house is coming up to its 100th birthday - and in a way I feel as if we have given it a present. It's a lovely, if tatty, Edwardian house and we've been here for nearly 5 years. Before that a family lived here for a short while and before that the original owners lived and died inside this house. But in all that time the loft has been waiting - the beams straining under the roof, the chimneys standing un-noticed sentinels - for some attention and loving care. And now the chimney seems to sway against the sky as I lie in bed and watch its silhouette, close enough to touch if I lean out of the window.

For the first time in this house we've enough room to move around each other without collisions and without stuff piled into every corner. We sort of plan to move into the country in the next couple of years; out of all my family, I'm the only city dweller. But it occurs to me that maybe we're beginning to turn this house into a home and maybe we're going to find it hard to leave.