When a home becomes a house

At the beginning of November 2017 we packed up the house in Loughton that we had lived in for twenty years and set off on our adventures. Today, exactly fifty weeks later, we have sold the house and it is no longer ours. Indeed, as of today we don’t have a house at all – our possessions are in storage and we are literally living in ‘Hope’, although we are in the process of buying a house in North Somerset.

Our original intention had been to rent the house out for a year while we travelled so we had packed all our belongings into the basement leaving just our furniture on display. However, the rental option didn’t materialise and on our return to the UK we decided to put the house up for sale while we continued our travels.

When we bought the house in 1998 we were faced with a major refurbishment project and, with not a lot of money to play with, we knew we would have to do a lot of it ourselves.

The house on the hill, 1998

Many people expressed the view that we were mad, and at times we were forced to agree with them. One friend unhelpfully lent us a copy of the 1986 film ‘The Money Pit’ (starring Tom Hanks and Shelley Long) which is a great movie, but not one to watch when you have just bought your own ‘project’.

The purchase itself was a battle because the surveyor’s report was so bad that initially the mortgage company refused to provide the finance, but we believed it was the house that God had chosen for us, and history proved it to be an inspired choice. After five years of relentless work on the house we decided enough was enough and abandoned our tools and took up cycling instead, which proved to be a far more congenial way to spend our time. Our new found freedom from decorating also opened up the opportunity to share the house with countless others who moved in to fill up the rooms as our children moved on to university. In maintenance terms the house entered a period of what might be described as ‘studied neglect’.

As a home it was beyond compare, providing a place of rest and fellowship for the residents and visitors alike. Around fifteen different individuals or families from seven different nations have lived with us for extended periods over the last fifteen years, plus of course our immediate family. Each of them brought added colour into our lives – some more than others it has to be said!

Our one condition before people moved in was that they had to treat the house as their home (and share in the washing up of course 😉). We didn’t seek to define what we meant by home, but it certainly included an expectation that it was a place where you didn’t stand on ceremony, that you were expected to join in with family life and not feel you had to hide away in your room.

And then one day, in November last year it suddenly stopped being our home and became just a house – a house that we still owned and were responsible for, but no longer the place that pulled on our hearts and that we were glad to return to after time away. When we returned from our travels overseas we very deliberately didn’t unpack the boxes from the basement for fear that would somehow release the magnetic pull of home once more. Instead we chose to hold onto the house lightly, to keep a restless spirit burning within us so that we would be free to travel once we were back in the UK.

Now without any house at all we realise that actually we don’t currently have a home. We don’t have a settled community to belong to, to invest in. Instead we have a series of passing encounters that are heartfelt but inevitably short lived. That is fine for a season, but eventually the need for ‘home’ will become too great a pull and we will cease to be travellers once again.