Two things happened in quick succession recently, and such cosmic symbolism is not lost on me. The first: my boyfriend and I gave notice on our shared flat. We’re moving into our own place. It will be my first time living solely with a partner and creating a space of my own.
Finally! Squeezing into someone else’s vision of life is not something I will miss from communal living, which is so often antithetical to healthy relationships. No longer will I reduce myself at home, or dim the colour of my life to the inoffensive pale grey that career-landlords love to choose for furniture. I’m ready. Or at least I thought I was.
A few days later, Mum called: she needed somewhere to keep some stuff while electricians did urgent work. I had a brainwave. “I’ll build her a flatpack shed,” I thought. “How hard can it be?”
Readers, I fell at the first hurdle. It isn’t actually possible to get a shed delivered at short notice. Sheds are not like Deliveroo dinners. You can’t even collect a shed, because high retail rents rule out the stocking of large items that won’t shift quickly (making sheds the latest addition to the list of things landlords have ruined for my generation).
It’s not my fault. Amazon sold me a dream of instant-delivery-everything, and now my dream is dashed. With moving, now I think only about my unpreparedness; my poor DIY skills, how putting up a tent with my beloved is bad enough, let alone decorating (“He has severe tent rage,” I say. “I’d be wary of giving him a mallet”); and how I thought I understood the price of things until I went to Habitat.
I’ve figured out the secret of what makes a home – creating room for our individual expression. But how to actually create one? That will be a steep learning curve.
