Author: Lady Gravethorn

In which I discover there are apparently 47 shades of Victorian green, none of them are right, and B&Q consider legal action.

The Inheritance

When we last left the dining room, it was aggressively yellow, the corner shelves were being held together with cable ties, and I had plans.

Big plans.

Before any of those plans could begin, however, there was the small matter of furniture….Enter Mumsy.

My mum had been faithfully storing a large oak side cabinet in her conservatory, apparently waiting for the glorious day when I finally owned a house big enough to rehome it.

Or, translated from Mum: she didn’t want it anymore, it took up too much space, but it was “too good to get rid of.”

Thankfully, Everstead is considerably more accommodating than any of my previous houses, so the great ceremonial passing of the sideboard could finally take place.

As a side note, this is largely how the first two properties I owned ended up semi-furnished too. Mum has never met a perfectly serviceable piece of furniture she could actually get rid of when she has a daughter with an address.

Thanks, Mumsy.

And actually, the cabinet was perfect. Big, solid, properly wooden and exactly the sort of thing I wanted in there.

Now all I had to do was transform the migraine-yellow room around it into the dark, sumptuous, vaguely Victorian dining room I had in my head.

Easy.

The Green That Was Definitely The Green

I knew exactly what colour I wanted.

Green.

Not just any green, obviously. A dark, sumptuous, Victorian green. Moody without being gloomy. Dramatic without making the room look like a cave. The sort of green that would make Mumsy’s enormous oak cabinet look intentional rather than like she’d finally managed to clear out her conservatory.

And I found it.

The Green.

I was absolutely certain. This was exactly the colour I’d had in my head.

So I painted a decent-sized chunk of it onto the main wall.

It was not The Green.

No matter. Back to B&Q.

I found another one.

This was The Green.

Another sizeable patch went up beside the first.

It was also not The Green.

What followed were another six or seven shades, because apparently I don’t believe in those sensible little tester squares normal people paint discreetly behind a door. I needed large areas of evidence.

Before long, the main dining-room wall looked like some sort of Victorian-green police line-up, with each suspect having briefly been identified as The One before being eliminated from enquiries.

By 24th August, I had apparently developed a part-time career in paint selection and was somewhere around shade 47 of “dark, sumptuous Victorian green.”

At this point B&Q really should have put me on the rota.

And I was still convinced that the problem was simply that I hadn’t found the right green yet.

Reader, the green was not the problem.

In Theory, This Was Going Brilliantly

There was another reason I was so convinced one of these greens had to work.

I had technology on my side.

Before committing to each new contender, I’d enlisted my long-suffering AI accomplice, Clarence, to mock up my actual dining room in various shades of dark Victorian green.

And every single bloody one looked perfect.

Deep green? Gorgeous.

Slightly darker green? Even better.

Moody, almost-black green?

THERE. THAT’S IT. THAT’S THE ONE.

In theory, Clarence and I had successfully decorated the dining room several times over.

So why, when I put these supposedly perfect colours onto the actual wall, did every single one immediately become wrong?

I had photographic evidence. I had artificial intelligence. I had approximately half the paint department at B&Q.

What more did this room want from me?

Apparently, daylight.

Apparently I Have Designed a Cave

For several days I lived with my Victorian-green police line-up, wandering past it at different times of day and staring at the wall as though one of the shades might eventually crack under questioning.

During the day, I still loved the idea.

Then the evenings started drawing in.

Suddenly all those rich, sumptuous, beautifully moody greens I’d spent weeks obsessing over started looking rather less Victorian manor house and rather more underground drinking establishment where no natural light has penetrated since 1847.

There was also the small matter of the room itself. It’s a big room, but it doesn’t get masses of natural light, and apparently painting the walls the colour of a particularly dense forest wasn’t going to improve matters.

I began to have doubts.

Not little perhaps I’ll go one shade lighter doubts.

Full ABORT THE ENTIRE GREEN PLAN doubts.

Which, after approximately seven tester pots, several large patches of wall and enough visits to B&Q that I was practically entitled to staff discount, was excellent timing.

So naturally, having spent weeks trying to find the perfect green, I did the only sensible thing.

I started looking at red.

And actually, I had logic.

The kitchen already had bright red running through it. The lounge was heading firmly into moody oxblood territory. The dining room sits between the two, so suddenly red wasn’t just another colour I’d become temporarily obsessed with.

Red would make the whole stretch cohesive.

Obviously.

The kitchen would be the brighter end, the lounge dark and moody, and the dining room would sit beautifully between them in some sort of rich Victorian wine, claret, oxblood situation.

It made perfect sense.

In fact, within approximately twelve minutes, I’d convinced myself this had probably been the plan all along.

Perfect.

Green had merely been an unfortunate seven-tester-pot-long administrative error.

The Red Era

So off I went again.

This time, we were looking for red.

Not red red, obviously. Nothing that screamed postbox or primary-school paint tray. I wanted something deep, rich and suitably Victorian. Something that would bridge the brighter reds in the kitchen with the moody oxblood of the lounge and prove that this latest change of direction was, in fact, an entirely deliberate interior-design decision.

We tried red.

Then claret.

Then oxblood.

Then another red that was definitely going to be The One.

And, for reasons I can no longer adequately explain, one violently bright pink that had absolutely no business being in the line-up.

I don’t know what happened there.

Presumably by this point I’d looked at so many paint cards that I’d temporarily lost the ability to perceive colour.

And yet, once again, nothing worked.

The green police line-up had now been joined by an entire red-light district, plus one rogue Barbie who appeared to have wandered in from another investigation.

And every single one looked wrong.

At this point I was beginning to question everything.

My taste.

My eyesight.

Clarence’s credentials.

The entire visible colour spectrum.

And then I realised.

It wasn’t the green.

It wasn’t the red.

It wasn’t even the rogue pink.

It was the bloody yellow.

The Actual Culprit

That demented daffodil yellow wasn’t merely sitting there being offensive.

It was actively sabotaging the investigation.

The beautiful deep greens I’d chosen were turning blue against it. The rich reds, clarets and oxbloods were becoming muddy, brown and generally reminiscent of something you’d find at the bottom of a Victorian drain.

No wonder nothing looked like the mock-ups.

We had been auditioning colours against several square metres of weaponised sunshine and then blaming the colours when they failed.

Suddenly, I had hope again.

Maybe I did have taste.

Maybe Clarence did know what he was doing.

Maybe one of the approximately fourteen colours currently decorating random sections of my wall had actually been perfect all along.

There was only one way to find out.

The yellow had to die.

All of it.

So I went out, bought a giant value tub of white paint and set to work.

This wasn’t decorating anymore. There was no carefully considered shade, no mood board, no Clarence mock-up. I wasn’t interested in undertones, heritage palettes or whether the white leaned warm or cool.

I just needed something, anything, between my prospective Victorian dining room and that demented yellow.

So I painted.

And painted.

And painted.

And discovered that apparently the yellow wasn’t going quietly.

Even under white paint it fought back, glowing through in patches like a demon with a paintbrush.

At this point it had become personal.

I wasn’t even sure what colour the dining room was going to end up anymore.

But it wasn’t going to be fucking yellow.

The Exorcism of the Yellow

The value white had done its best, bless it, but the yellow was still there.

Lurking.

Glowing.

Waiting for me to turn my back so it could make another perfectly respectable shade of green look inexplicably blue.

So, right.

Back to B&Q.

Assuming, of course, I wasn’t already the respondent of some sort of paint-department restraining order.

By this point I imagine the staff had started drawing straws when they saw me coming.

She’s back.

Don’t make eye contact.

For God’s sake, nobody show her the heritage range.

But this time I wasn’t messing around.

I found the thickest, most industrial-looking, yellow-defeating primer I could get my hands on.

I didn’t care about finish. I didn’t care about coverage per litre. I didn’t care whether it was technically excessive for the job.

I wanted something capable of sealing that yellow beneath the surface for future archaeologists to discover.

If B&Q had sold primer specifically labelled FOR COLOURS THAT HAVE WRONGED YOU PERSONALLY, I’d have bought two tins.

Back at Everstead, on it went.

And finally, slowly, gloriously…

the yellow disappeared.

We had won.

And after everything I’d been through, I was finally standing in front of a blank, neutral canvas ready to choose the perfect colour for my dark, sumptuous Victorian dining room.

So naturally…

I left it like that for weeks.

I Am No Longer Decorating. I Am Seeking Peace.

By mid-September, I’d had enough.

The Victorian green dream was dead. The reds had been dismissed. The rogue pink had been escorted from the premises and I’d spent far too much of my life thinking about paint.

I didn’t want sumptuous.

I didn’t want dramatic.

I didn’t want to hear the words undertone, heritage or colour palette ever again.

I wanted grey.

Plain, inoffensive, absolutely-not-yellow grey.

Of course, being me, I couldn’t simply walk into B&Q and buy a grey.

That would be ridiculous.

We tried another six.

Because apparently even at the very brink of paint-related psychological collapse, I still had standards.

Eventually, we settled on GoodHome Whistler.

Was it the dramatic Victorian colour I’d imagined when this whole thing began?

No.

Was it green?

No.

Was it red?

Also no.

Was it going to turn blue, become Victorian-drain brown or unexpectedly reveal itself to be Barbie pink?

Hopefully fucking not.

Decision made.

Paint bought.

And then, having finally settled the matter once and for all…

we did absolutely nothing with it for another couple of weeks.

Progress. Technically.

Eventually, on a random Friday afternoon we decided it was time.

The paint had been sitting there patiently waiting for us. The yellow was safely entombed. The colour had been chosen.

There were literally no more decisions left to make.

So we got the rollers out, opened the Whistler and finally started painting the dining room.

We painted half of it.

Not because we wanted to see how it dried.

Not because we were checking it in different lights.

Not because there was some complicated decorating reason why stopping halfway was actually very sensible.

It was Friday night and, quite frankly, we couldn’t be arsed to do the other half.

So, after weeks of indecision, approximately fourteen thousand tester pots, several existential crises and enough visits to B&Q that I’m surprised they haven’t named an aisle after me, the grand transformation of Everstead’s dining room was finally underway.

Half of it was grey.

The other half could wait.

UPDATE: 12.10.26

While I was busy documenting our spectacular lack of progress, Joel quietly went and painted the rest of the dining room.

Bless him.

We officially have one whole grey room.

We officially have one whole grey room.

And actually? After everything this room put me through, I really bloody like it.

Now I can finally get on with the important bit: filling it with furniture, questionable antiques and things that may or may not be haunted.

Please nobody mention Victorian green for a while!!

Our first day at Everstead involved wrong keys, mystery furniture, abandoned toiletries, cupboards full of half-used food and a corner sofa that refused to enter the lounge.

The Grand Arrival

There is, apparently, a version of moving day where you arrive at your new home, clutch the keys, take the obligatory photo outside the front door and then actually go inside…We managed the photo.

Big cheesy smiles. Keys held up. Very look at us, homeowners.

Then the key labelled front door didn’t open the front door. Fine.

We tried the back door….That one didn’t work either.

Now, not that I’m one to panic… much…*eye roll* but having just legally acquired a house and then discovering you can’t actually get into it does take the shine off things slightly.

Thankfully, Joel remembered the previous owners had given us two sets of keys.

Cue me rummaging through the depths of my handbag and eventually finding one labelled porch. Eureka!

We were in.

Everstead’s first act as our forever home was, naturally, to lock us out.And somewhere in the middle of all this, the movers had already phoned to say they were early and had left the big furniture in the garage.

So, having finally managed to enter the house we now owned, we could begin the relaxing business of moving furniture back out of the garage and into it.

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Apparently Owning the House Was the Easy Bit

Once we were finally inside, the first job was to make sure the furniture we had bought from the previous owners had actually stayed put.

Most importantly, the huge dining table and chairs. Present and correct. Fabulous.

There were also a few extra bits of furniture we had neither paid for nor requested, which was… generous, I suppose.

Then came the furniture the movers had left in the garage (as they decided to show up an hour early and we had only just left court!) So we spent the next while hauling that back into the house before getting Young Miss’s room set up. She was due back from sports club later and I knew she would want to inspect her new kingdom immediately.

Joel then went off to collect our trusty Evie van and begin the evacuation of approximately twenty years of my life from the boxes I had stacked in his dining room, plus the rest of his things, while I stayed at Everstead and started unpacking.

Music on. Windows open. Boxes everywhere.

It was also the middle of a heatwave.

So I was sweating my way up and down the house carrying labelled boxes and trying to remember which door led to which room.

At some point, while lugging another box upstairs, I had a sudden flashback to the five-storey Victorian townhouse we had nearly bought.

Four people. One cat. Five floors. Me and Joel doing the move ourselves. In August.I think that may actually have finished me off.

For once, Everstead’s comparatively sensible number of stairs felt like one of the best decisions we had made.

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The Kitchen Had Other Ideas

I started in the kitchen, which seemed sensible enough.

Then I noticed the smell.

At first I assumed something slightly questionable had travelled with us in one of the boxes.

Nope.

It was the cupboards….And the drawers.

All of them, apparently.

A sort of strange musty smell that seemed to have settled into every available surface.

Fine. Annoying, but fixable. We had enough cleaning products between us to sterilise a minor operating theatre, so I got to work wiping out every sticky drawer and cupboard before putting the essentials away.

Then I opened a few more cupboards and discovered that the previous occupants had also left us a selection of half-used bottles, tins and assorted mystery condiments.

Lovely. More bin bags.

There is something very intimate about inheriting somebody else’s open sauces that I had not previously considered.

To be fair, they had also left us a fridge containing various bottles of wine and caffeine-free Diet Coke…So, swings and roundabouts.

Once the kitchen was vaguely clean, vaguely functional and no longer full of somebody else’s dinner plans, I moved on to the rest of the house box by box.

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Apparently This Was Ours Too

Once the kitchen was under control, I moved on to the rest of the house.

Which is when I started discovering just how much of the previous occupants’ lives had remained behind.

The bathroom greeted me with an old toothpaste-covered glass, toothbrushes, and various half-used bottles of shampoo and body wash.

Great! More bin bags.

And then there was the furniture.

Little bits here. Random bits there. Things we definitely had not bought and definitely had not asked them to leave.

So, naturally, a pile began to form.

The official Everstead collection of what the fuck do we do with this?

Some of it looked potentially useful. Some of it very much did not.But all of it had somehow become our problem.

At this point I was beginning to realise that moving into a house isn’t just about bringing your own belongings in.

Sometimes it’s also about discovering which parts of somebody else’s life have quietly been promoted to yours, whether you like it or not!

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And Then There Was the Yellow

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I properly looked at the dining room.

We had obviously seen it before. Several times, in fact.

But somehow, during the viewings, the colour hadn’t seemed quite so… aggressive.

Now, with the previous owners’ belongings gone and the room standing there in all its naked glory, there was no avoiding it.

It was yellow. Not tasteful mustard. Not warm ochre. Not soft golden sunshine. Migraine-inducing banana bloody yellow. I am not, in any way shape or form, a yellow sunshiney person.

The huge dining table I loved was still there, thankfully, but now it appeared to be sitting inside the world’s largest banana.

Immediate mental note: this was going to have to change.

Exhibit B: apparently we had bought a dining room sponsored by a highlighter pen.

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The Sofa Had Other Plans

It was around half past twelve.

We had owned Everstead for roughly two hours.

Naturally, this was when the sofa arrived.

This was the one genuinely new piece of furniture we had bought for the house, so I was very excited to see it finally turn up.

The delivery men were lovely, friendly, chatty, and immediately set about hauling the various sections into the lounge while I sensibly stayed out of the way.

Then came the words nobody really wants to hear from a furniture delivery man.

“Err… excuse me…”

Yes, my good man?

“Well… erm… this bit doesn’t fit.”

Fuck.

The actual corner section of the corner sofa would not make the 90-degree turn through the dining-room and lounge doorframes.

They tried.

And tried.

And tried again.

All of this in Sahara-adjacent August heat.

Eventually they had to concede defeat.

The corner unit was not going into the lounge.

They did suggest it might go through the window, which sounded promising for approximately three seconds until we remembered that the lounge window was, of course, the only window in the bloody house that didn’t open.

So the orphaned corner section was left sitting in a corner.

Of the dining room.

And I sat on one of the sofa sections that had successfully made it into the lounge, sweating quietly, wondering what on earth I was going to do now….so I did all i could, I shoved the two bits that did fit together to make the best of it…not quite the family of 5 corner unit I had pictured. But oh well! At least we could sit.

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Young Miss Arrives

But it was fine.

Young Miss was due home soon and I was fairly certain the sight of her new room would restore some order to proceedings.

Now, I will admit, the furniture we had bought from the previous owners for her room was a bit… erm… not exactly tweenager chic.

But it was practical. A small wardrobe. Drawers for the approximately nine hundred items of clothing she owns. And, most importantly, a gorgeous double bed with what was basically a brand-new mattress.

At the old house she had only had a single, so this felt very exciting.

I’d put on the new topper I’d bought, made the bed with the fresh bedding she had chosen herself, and stood back thinking she was going to be thrilled.

I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

Just before I went to collect her, I got a text from her friend’s mum asking if she wanted a sleepover. Perfect.

She could come back, grab her things, show her friend the new house, and then head off for the night while Joel and I finished sorting the chaos.

That was the plan.

She arrived, went upstairs, took one look at the top floor she had previously been thrilled about…and decided she absolutely, positively could not live there. Then burst into tears.

Her friend, standing in the doorway, helpfully added: “I don’t blame you, Tilly. I wouldn’t live here.”

Excellent. Always nice to get an impartial second opinion. *eye roll*

By this point I was exhausted, emotionally spent and approximately one inconvenience away from my third breakdown of the day.

It was only 3:30pm.

So naturally, this was the moment I had to break the news that we also had no internet and probably wouldn’t have any for another day or two. Young Miss took this exceptionally well. By which I mean the volcano of rage finally erupted.

There was outrage. There was flouncing. There was a dramatic exit from Everstead, apparently never to return.

Great.

We had owned the house for about five hours….and things were going swimmingly.

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Fine. We’ll Just Go to Bed Then

So I took Young Miss and her friend back to her friend’s much nicer, normal house where they had internet and trudged back to Everstead.

By this point, what little joy I had left had been unceremoniously sucked out of me.

I had imagined our first afternoon in the new house involving excitement, wandering around, maybe a drink, maybe some sentimental nonsense.

Instead I had been locked out, scrubbed out someone else’s cupboards, inherited several unwanted possessions, watched a sofa fail to enter the lounge, and been informed by a child that our new home was essentially uninhabitable.

Still, at least it was only mid-afternoon.

Joel was still doing the final Evie van runs, bringing back the last of my stuff from his place and adding it to the ever-expanding garage situation.

Eventually, somehow, we stopped.

We sat down.

Properly sat down.

No boxes in our hands. No furniture being moved. No child declaring the house unfit for human habitation.

Just us.

And then we remembered we still had no internet.

Of course we didn’t.

No TV. No TikTok. No mindless scrolling. No background noise. No modern little electronic anaesthetic to take the edge off the day.

By about 9pm we looked at each other and reached the same conclusion.

Fine.

We’ll just go to bloody bed then.

There had been no graceful wandering from room to room, no celebratory drinks, no peaceful settling in.

There had been wrong keys, mystery furniture, abandoned toiletries, a violently yellow dining room, one sofa section in exile, one furious child and absolutely no internet.

But we were in.

Somehow, among all the boxes and chaos, Everstead was ours.

Home sweet home…ish.

A Childhood of Questionable Taste

I think the Everstead aesthetic started before I was old enough to have an aesthetic, certainly before I was old enough to spell it!

Apparently, when I was barely old enough to talk, I would happily chatter away to “the nice old lady” in my bedroom.

No one else could see her.

In hindsight, that feels like the sort of detail my parents might have investigated rather than filed under adorable childhood quirk.

Years later, by complete chance, my dad met the original owners of that house. At some point, they asked whether he had ever seen the ghost…

An old lady. Their grandmother. She had died years earlier.

And guess which room had been her favourite?

Bingo! My bedroom.

So that was reassuring.

As far back as I can remember, I was drawn to things that were a little odd, a little dark and, according to my mother, not remotely normal.

My bookshelves were full of horror stories, Poe, books about communicating with spirits and other titles that probably weren’t what my parents had pictured when they imagined raising a daughter.

And yes, I still have most of them. They’re in the dining room now… obviously. More on that another time.

I suspect they had hoped for picture books, ballet and perhaps one harmless obsession with ponies.

Instead, they got a tiny paranormal librarian.

My mum regularly asked (and occasionally still does) why I couldn’t just be normal and like flowers and pretty things.

The thing is, I do like pretty things.

I just also think the macabre is beautiful.

Skulls. Ghost stories. Mourning imagery. Old things with questionable histories. Basically, anything that looks faintly haunted or as though it witnessed something terrible in 1897.

That, apparently, is my version of pretty.

My dad, meanwhile, mostly just leaned into it.

He indulged the strange books, the odd interests and the general fascination with anything vaguely gothic or unsettling.

He once bought me a life-size rubber skeleton because he knew I would love it.

I was twenty.

Not eight. Not twelve. Twenty.

So, of course, I hid it in the bed. 🤭

So really, none of this is new!

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The Haunted Townhouse of My Dreams

So, naturally, when it came to house hunting, I knew exactly what I wanted.

An old Victorian townhouse.

Fireplaces. Attics. High ceilings. Odd little rooms. The sort of place that creaks at night for reasons no surveyor can quite explain.

Basically, I wanted something with a very definite this is most definitely probably haunted vibe.

That was the dream.

Something old. Something full of character. Something that looked as though it had stories in the walls and possibly one room nobody had opened since 1894….However, that was not quite what happened.

Because when you are actually buying a house, apparently things like parking, gardens, bedrooms, location and whether the roof is about to collapse are considered important. Who knew *obligatory eye roll*.

So we did what any sensible people would do and scrutinised practically every house Guernsey estate agents had to offer via an ever-growing spreadsheet, meticulously curated by yours trulyIt had to be right and nothing less than my haunted vision would do.

I had lived in my old house for nearly twenty years and I wasn’t moving for anything less than the one.

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Enter: The Spreadsheet

The spreadsheet became increasingly serious.

Every house we even vaguely considered went on it. Price. Location. Bedrooms. Garden. Parking. Layout. Work needed. Pros. Cons. General likelihood of bankrupting us.

Nothing escaped scrutiny.

And because I had lived in the same house for nearly twenty years, I was ruthless about it. I wasn’t moving for “nice”, I wasn’t moving for “it’ll do”.

If I was going to pack up almost two decades of my life and leave the house I knew inside out, it had to be worth it.

At one point, we went to see what we thought might actually be the house. On paper, it was brilliant. Modern. Beautifully finished. En-suite bathroom. Playroom for the kids. Everything neat and coordinated and very grown-up….and grey,so Much. Grey. It was like Mrs Hinch’s Castle Grey.It was objectively lovely.

I hated it the minute I walked in.

There was nothing wrong with it. That was almost the problem.It had no odd corners. No strange little details. No sense that anyone had ever made a questionable decorating decision there at 11pm with a glass of wine and misplaced confidence. It was a beautifully curated box.

And apparently, despite all the practical boxes on the spreadsheet, what I actually wanted was a house with a pulse….and Track House was most definitely not it!

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The Benchmark House (Rouge Rue House)

We carried on looking, but my heart was still firmly set on a five-bedroom townhouse just minutes from my old house.

It was empty, dangerously close by, and I drove past it twice a day every day and then walked past it a third time….every day!

We peered through the windows, inspected it from every possible pavement angle and I had already mentally installed myself in the grand kitchen.

Technically, it was what I wanted.

Townhouse. Character. Space. Close to everything I already knew.

But then we did what we had done with every other house. We picked it apart.

The parking wasn’t ideal. The garden was small. The outside needed some fairly serious maintenance.

None of that stopped me wanting it, obviously.It was still the benchmark.

Joel, however, was becoming increasingly distracted by another house entirely.

A house in Oatlands that wasn’t particularly high on our spreadsheet and, if I’m honest, wasn’t even one we were especially considering viewing.

What it did have was an estate agent’s floor plan that appeared to have been drawn during some sort of fever dream. Doors seemed to lead nowhere. Rooms appeared to have no doors at all.

What was this What was this? A Guernsey Sarah Winchester mystery house?Consider my curiosity piqued. We had to go and see it…If nothing else, I needed to know what on earth was going on with that floor plan so, in my mind, we could put it to bed and move on to mentally moving into Rouge Rue House.

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The House That Wasn’t Supposed to Win

So we went.

And no, it was not the glorious Guernsey mystery house I had briefly imagined. There were no impossible corridors, no doors leading to nowhere, no secret passages. It was just a crap floor plan.

Slightly disappointing, if I’m honest. But hey we’re here lets look around…It had a fireplace, a HUGE (albeit banana yellow) dining room, plenty of parking (something I have never had in all the properties I have owned and lived) A lovely garden, enough rooms for the kids to have their own space.

And a red and black kitchen….I mean, come on. Me much?

It wasn’t the Victorian townhouse of my dreams. It wasn’t even especially close to the brief I had started with. But suddenly it was ticking box after box after box.

So we did what we always did. We went home, pondered it, ripped it apart and analysed every possible flaw and I continued making my case for the townhouse.

And then, without really noticing it happen, something shifted. Every other house we looked at started being compared to the Oatlands house….Including my beloved townhouse.

Somewhere along the way, the house that wasn’t supposed to win had quietly become the benchmark. Hmmm…..

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The Kids Decide

After benchmarking basically every other house against Oatlands, including my absolutely the one townhouse, we went back for a second viewing.

This time we took my parents and the kids with us….I wanted to know how it felt with actual life in it rather than just the two of us wandering around mentally moving furniture and arguing over parking and get the very rare seal of approval from my very picky mother. I knew she would pick up on all the little things that I would call quirky in my haste to find “the house” but would surely drive us all insane within 2 days of moving in.

And then the Miss and Master tore off into the garden, running around and squealing with joy…..Well. That was it.

It still wasn’t my haunted Victorian townhouse…BUT:

It had a fireplace.

Proper parking.

A lovely garden.

A bloody apple tree.

More space than either of us really knew what to do with.

Rooms for the kids to have their own space.

And now, apparently, the full child seal of approval.

We had to offer.So we did.

There was some negotiation, some tense back and forth, and eventually an offer was accepted just within the absolute maximum we were willing to go to.

FUCK.

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And Then It Became Everstead

Getting from offer accepted to actually getting the keys was not exactly a calm, graceful journey.

There were ups and downs, delays, stress and more than one wobble from me that I was somehow compromising on the townhouse of my haunted dreams.

Had I been too sensible? Had I let the spreadsheet win? Was I going to spend the next ten years driving past Victorian townhouses and sighing dramatically?

Possibly.

But eventually, on 13 August 2026, the Oatlands house became ours.

And almost immediately, it stopped being the Oatlands house. Because if I wasn’t getting my Victorian manor house, I was at least going to give this one a proper name.

So, much to the apparent horror of the previous owners, we went to court and officially renamed it.

Everstead.

The house hunt was over and now the real fun could begin!!!