Bloganuary #20

What irritates you about the home you live in?

I have to admit that nothing “irritates” me about the home I live in – I love it as it is a large part of converted Baptist chapel (much like the image above). What actually “irritates” me is our inability to make the adaptations we want quickly enough. It would have been very nice if we could have managed the renovation/conversion ourselves, as it suits us fine, but it would have been so nice to start from the original chapel and then converted it to our needs or rather my needs!

The section of the chapel in which we live is lovely and unlike that shown in the picture, the gravestones have all been removed and now form part of our walled garden & upper parking area. It’s in the ideal area of a town too, which is very convenient for me now that I use a wheelchair. Unlike the building shown in the picture our house is actually the annex that was built alongside a small chapel and so we don’t have quite as grandiose entrance as shown. The side windows are very similar to our house and we do have a couple of arched windows too, but not like those shown. It’s also made of stone rather than bricks, which can be a blessing but sometimes causes problems for our IT systems such as Wi-Fi.

The gardens are nowhere near as extensive as those shown, but as we have paved the central area of our walled garden that hardly matters. We do still have lots of greenery though and lovely plants in beds surrounding the central paved area – we even have 3 ancient lime trees along the front perimeter interspersed by a rather boring hedge that makes the front parking area quite green but prone to being quite dark. It’s not at the moment, because we have just had our lime trees pollarded and hopefully when we get some sun it will become quite bright and welcoming.

Well that is enough about the physical house, but what really makes a house into a home is the people and our neighbours are extremely friendly. They even traditionally hold a street party once a year in the summer, which we’ve only been to the one time because it conflicts with a Science Festival that we like to visit each year. The roads are very narrow (so one-way only) and the local council lets them shut off our Street just for the street party, which is very convivial and is often still going on when we arrived home late from our Science Festival trip. By this time the street has reopened, but there are always a few of our neighbours still sitting out talking and/or finishing items of food from the barbecue. As we pass down the street very slowly, we open the windows and have a chat with all of those people who are still around.

So not very good answer to what “irritates” me about our home, because nothing really irritates me about it. The irritation comes from us and our lack of ability to get things moving. Having said that, we had the garden paved last spring, the trees pollarded just a few weeks ago and we are getting someone in to replace most of the windows (in the same style of course as it is a conservation area) and also the front door. Now I just need to wait for the weather to brighten up a bit and all will be lovely. (I am very lucky to have found such a lovely house and surrounding area / people.)