we have a house!

Oh what an excit­ing day we’ve had! And when on earth was the last time I said THAT?! Actu­al­ly it was­n’t so much an excit­ing day in and of itself, but it was the day we got the keys to our new HOUSE!

It was thrilling to walk around the new­ly-paint­ed pris­tine, white, emp­ty rooms and imag­ine where all our belong­ings are going to go, espe­cial­ly rejoic­ing in the good­ly array of built-in book­shelves. Of course, I have my 11 foot by 11 foot sys­tem of remov­able shelv­ing com­ing with us, which will make a divine­ly warm and fuzzy wall in the kitchen (I think books are high­ly under­rat­ed as a dec­o­rat­ing tech­nique, don’t you? all that col­or and vari­ety). But to have fur­ther space will just be heav­en­ly. For once in my life, and Avery’s life, there may well be room enough for all our books to have a home. I ful­ly plan to alpha­bet­ize them this time, because I spend an inor­di­nate amount of time, hands on hips, gaz­ing over the shelves try­ing des­per­ate­ly to find something.

The land­la­dy could not be sweet­er. She brought tea bags and cof­fee, loo paper and soap, and a bot­tle of cham­pagne! And for Avery a bot­tle of spark­ly apple juice. How nice is that? She gen­uine­ly wants us to be hap­py there, which makes a big dif­fer­ence when you’re writ­ing out the rent check. “The neigh­bors will all call,” she said, “but you need­n’t wor­ry that they’ll be intru­sive. They’ll just be there in case you can’t find your tin open­er.” She has a daugh­ter spend­ing her gap year all over the world (today she’s in Laos) and so was sym­pa­thet­ic with my nerves over mere Nor­mandy. “They do go off,” she said, “just make sure that if it’s 3 a.m. and she’s drunk in a pub and needs a ride home, she calls you and not some­one else.” Hard to believe that will ever hap­pen, but one nev­er knows! Ado­les­cence makes fools of us all, I suppose.

We went all through the house with the lit­tle book­let she made up for us with instruc­tions on how every­thing works. The only thing not work­ing at present is the ice mak­er in the freez­er, but she has a tech­ni­cian com­ing, know­ing that insane Amer­i­cans can­not live with­out ice. I could­n’t believe it: this morn­ing I went to Marks and Spencer to get ice, and there… was­n’t any. No one else seemed both­ered about this, but I felt it was an out­rage! No ice.

From the house we went up to Ken­sal Rise to the fur­ni­ture ware­house we’d seen in a booth at the antique fair this week­end, and found a per­fect­ly fab­u­lous part­ner desk, made of ash and cov­ered in rather bat­tered blue leather. What fun that would be! We rushed back home and mea­sured the front room and it could fit. Rushed back to our cur­rent abode and imme­di­ate­ly we both went into fran­tic tele­phone mode: I called the vet to get the cat­tery num­ber in Kent, called the cat­tery and booked all four felines into a “fam­i­ly chalet” for the week of the move. I love it: the girl who answered the phone took down the cats’ names before she asked mine.

Then I called the uphol­ster­er who is hold­ing our sofa and bench hostage and had his assur­ance that the fab­ric had been ordered. That would be entire­ly good news only he has­n’t told us how much he is charg­ing, and now it sounds as if we’re com­mit­ted, with the fab­ric already on its way. Sigh. Then I called the book­shelf peo­ple and sched­uled a “de-install and re-install” on just exact­ly the day I want­ed them to come: when the movers have depart­ed with the box­es of books and are on their way to take them to my new kitchen.

This love­ly vine is jas­mine, it turns out, fram­ing our blue front door. The land­la­dy says that when the weath­er is fine, we can open the sit­ting room win­dows and the smell of jas­mine will come float­ing in. And the fire­places work! All three of them, in what will be the Avery-do-your-home­work room off the kitchen, in my study at the front of the house, and in the big recep­tion room upstairs.

Whew! Tonight we’re going out to din­ner with our love­ly neigh­bors, to a French restau­rant around the cor­ner and we can bore them both with our enthu­si­asm. I think it’s just pos­si­ble we’d be even more excit­ed if we had bought the house, but how’s this for a coin­ci­dence: just this morn­ing there were eco­nom­ic reports of the first offi­cial house price drop in 12 years. Long may it con­tin­ue! My last sto­ry of the day real­ly makes me laugh, in a frus­trat­ed sort of way. We had a love­ly chap from the old­est mov­ing com­pa­ny in Eng­land come to give us a quote. This firm has been in busi­ness for 400 years, for heav­en’s sake. But guess what? Last week they went into receiver­ship. Bank­rupt! Four hun­dred years in busi­ness and it takes OUR JOB to put them under! Ah well, we’ve found anoth­er com­pa­ny, so I can only hope they don’t real­ize the sort of curse we put on a business…