Seán Moncrieff: Our overcrowded house is creaking at the seams

Many months have passed since Daughter Number One, the Boyfriend and Granddaughter Number One moved in. Needless to say, there hasn’t been even a sniff of them finding any accommodation; or at least anything that might be suitable for a baby. All too often, the places are small, dark and grubby. Or the estate agent showing the property gives them monosyllabic answers and spends their time staring at their phone. On several viewings, they got the distinct impression that the tenants had already been chosen.

It’s begun to feel like there’s an official renting procedure, but behind that, a secret process with its own codes that none of us can figure out. It could be that they aren’t dressed the right way, or that they have a child, or that they don’t have jobs in Google. There’s an overwhelming sense of futility.

So, we’ve all been muddling through. We have a WhatsApp group called Housing Crisis, and try our best to work around each other, for laundry, showers, mealtimes. Not that there aren’t a lot of small tensions. Dirty dishes left in the sink, hoovering not done. It’s become a lesson in having two emotions simultaneously: you can be frustrated for someone and with someone at the same time.

But the signs of strain have been most obvious on the house itself. It’s looking a little bit more worn, and now that Granddaughter Number One is crawling, it’s had to be hastily redesigned to prevent her pulling books on top of herself or eating from the dog’s bowl.

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It’s often felt as if something was going to give and, eventually, something did.

Herself loved that washing machine. It came with the house when we moved in and she’s always maintained that it was top of the range. I sometimes suspected she wanted to buy the house for the washing machine.

It’s always had a lot of work to do; not just from the current domestic set-up, but various other children who would stay a night or two and manage to leave a mammoth amount of laundry behind; far more than they seemed to be wearing when they arrived. Probably out of sheer exhaustion, it went on the fritz at the start of this year. We paid to get it repaired, but when it happened again last month, we knew it was the end.

That last sentence somewhat oversimplifies what happened. More accurately, this was a grieving process. I snapped into bargaining mode, fervently Googling ways to potentially fix the problem without paying out any more repair money, while Herself skipped that stage and went straight to anger. A lot of anger. Without a clear target – you can hardly blame a machine – it radiated out of her.

For my mental and physical wellbeing, I bravely opted to avoid Herself for an hour or so, during which I came to acceptance: the realisation that we’d have to get a new one. And when I emerged from hiding, Herself had got there too, though with more of a sense of urgency. It was five o’clock on a Saturday. We had to get one right now.

Once you’ve figured out the dimensions it has to fit into, and take into account the price and the rating, it’s pretty straightforward. We were back home within the hour, though Herself didn’t feel any great relief. She was gripped by an unaccountable sadness, which could be construed as mourning an inanimate object. Perhaps it was what the washing machine represented: the imagined future that comes with buying a new home; of being in a place of calm and comfort.

Once the anger had gone, she felt a bit silly about it. So, perhaps as a comfort, she took refuge in the familiar: in a phrase that regularly punctuates our lives together: “You’re going to turn this into a column, aren’t you?”