I found out on the weekend the house H & I put an offer on (it got rejected) has now been sold. Despite telling myself I wasn’t emotionally attached and wasn’t going to budge on price, part of me was desperately hoping the owners would come back to us and change their minds, and I feel devastated and cheated that someone else now owns “our” house.


It had a big backyard full of lavender bushes and a trampoline and a swing. I realise these last two items wouldn’t be staying, just as we’re supposed to be looking past the posh furniture, but I could picture my unborn children playing in that yard, the same way I roller-skated and rode my tricycle and made mud pies in the backyards of my own childhood. I know urban infill means that the new generation of children often won’t experience the Aussie backyard that many of us grew up with, but to me it’s important, and one of the reasons I feel like it’s good that I’m having this baby in Australia (after all if I wanted a one metre sliver of backyard around the house I might as well have stayed in the basement flat in London).

The kitchen in this homely 1950s home had been renovated within the past two years and it was one of those funky shiny ones you see in the magazines, where the drawers glide back on their runners and everything’s smooth and rounded and reflective. I imagined myself – forgive this brief departure from my feminist ideals – wearing an apron and baking chocolate biscuits in this kitchen, my kids running through and stealing biscuits off the cooling rack as they disappeared outside to play with the other kids in the street. (In this little daydream of course a few years have passed and my domestic skills have evolved into full-blown Nigella-ism.)


It had a wood fire (for cosy nights snuggled up with my beautiful family in my beautiful loungeroom) and a feature wall painted in my favourite shade of burgundy (where I'd hang my children's paintings), and it had timber venetians and wooden floors and built in robes.

Everyone said at the time “don’t worry, if it’s meant to be, it’ll happen, and if not, something else will come up”. But I wonder if houses are a bit like men… in that you tell yourself all that but then find yourself tormented with regret when The One who got away goes and marries someone else.* Are we ever going to find another house that will magically turn me into a house-proud domestic goddess with lavender and swings in her backyard?

Or, like we also often do with men, am I imagining this house’s perfection because it was surface-gorgeous, when in actual fact it was probably a bit small for us, water damaged, a bit rough, and wouldn't have protected us from the elements (no carport)?

*I speak hypothetically of course, since my One hasn't managed to get away...