Let me say right up front in this retirement blog, I’m not good at letting things go, even for money. I’m more than ‘happy’ acquiring items, collecting stuff, stashing it away, being an ‘aquisitor’, but as for giving things away or even selling them, I’m rubbish. Some deep-seated childhood insecurity I suppose. But, and there’s a big but, and you’ll need to bear with me here…
I recently wrote a retirement blog about the dubious pleasures of doing things for the first time. I couldn’t say that what we did last week was for the first time but it was certainly the first time for a long time (about 4 months or since this virus business made it undesirable to travel outside of our immediate neighbourhood)).
I’m talking about driving down to Derbyshire to visit my ancestral home (that’s the one in the photo above, doesn’t look big or important enough to agonise over does it?) for the first time in quite a while. The fact that we could have gone down there a few weeks ago but chose not to gives you some idea of how this visit wasn’t quite as simple as it might first appear.
True, we chose to go to the vineyard as our first away from home trip rather than Derbyshire because there was work we needed to do up there. But there was more to it than this. I was positively reluctant to go to Derbyshire. Strange you think, why would he be reticent to visit the house where Mrs Summerhouse and himself had spent so much time over the last couple of years making it nice (which it wasn’t after my mother died)? We’re on record in these blogs as saying how much we’ve enjoyed our visits here. So what’s the problem? I will see if I can explain – as much to myself as to you.
But before I do, let me remind you I also wrote a retirement blog, a short while, ago about simplifying my retirement life. Part of this blog was concerned with whether having 3 properties was making my life more stressful than it needs to be. And whether the pleasure of visiting the place that had been my childhood home and which we liked the look of now, was being outweighed by the difficulties of travelling to and from and maintaining this property.
So, in the spirit of seizing the moment, putting two and two together and all that, I decided as we hadn’t been to the house for four months and furthermore as we hadn’t really missed it, (well a bit), and similarly Derbyshire itself, might now be the time to put the property on the market again?
I felt I needed the ducks to be somewhat lined up because, to repeat myself, I’m in some ways strangely reluctant to sell. Over the course of our stay I tried very hard to work out what the nature of my resistance was. The obvious explanation, I suppose, is that it was my childhood home. Albeit the one I couldn’t wait to get away from when I was eighteen. The second possibility is that we really liked the, mostly totally different, environment we had created.
Thinking about this I realised that, when my mother died, we put the house on the market immediately. Arguably this was the point in time when the house most closely resembled my childhood home and yet I had no reservations about putting it up for sale at that time. Which would suggest, therefore, that it was what we had done to it in the interim that was the attachment, not its history.
So, follow me carefully here. If this was true then all I needed to do was to re-create this environment in another place and I wouldn’t miss this setting at all. Simple? Of course there is then a question about how I do this. Where might this re-created place be?
The obvious location is up at the barn. We have land there, not a lot but surely enough if we are thoughtful. This ‘only’ leaves the building itself. Being an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (ANOB) there was no question of simply building another house, not that we could afford that anyway, not even with any money we might have from the sale of the Heanor house.
So for my cunning plan. I have always liked industrial buildings and even farm buildings made out of old corrugated iron. Like the one at the top of this retirement blog. Therefore we would erect an agricultural building of this type up at the vineyard. It being an agricultural building we wouldn’t need planning permission at least not in the traditional sense. At least that’s my idea at the moment. It won’t be as straight-forward as that of course. Nothing ever is where we are concerned.
But this is my thinking so far. All of the furniture, the art work, the rugs, the lighting, the books and so on, that we like so much from the Heanor house, would effortlessly (by a removal company) be delivered to storage in Leeds and from there, a bit at a time, to its new home in our van (which has just been serviced and MOTed by the way). Brilliant, what could possibly go wrong?
And even if this brilliant plan comes together in all its complexity (highly unlikely in my experience), the question remains, will I feel lighter (I’m not going to say happier) as a result. By this decisive action will I have made my retirement any more satisfying or at least more relaxing? I will have to try it and see.
Just by the way, if we had a building it could be anything from a museum of old memories, a lighter art studio for Mrs Summerhouse; a guest bedroom; a place for making our wine (Ha) even AirBnB or whatever you call it. That’s plenty to be going on with if we needed any extra incentive to sell the ancestral pile. Isn’t it?