Make a list of the things you want your home to have. Keep your bank accounts clean. Pay for childcare in cash. Stop doing the Lotto. Abandon your list. Think about leaving Dublin. Admit that you are too tired to start again in another new place.
Get advice from other buyers and try not to be resentful that they bought at a better time. Decide to stay on this side of that road. See a house with high ceilings on the other side of that road and be outbid by the time you admire the front door.
Meet estate agents with a smile. Swarm with the same sniffing, poking buyers. Notice that they are younger than you and have the type of skin that belongs to wealthy people who grew up near the sea. Stop smiling at estate agents because the queues into the houses are long and they don’t have the answers you want.
Remember the Celtic Tiger and ladders, and bubbles. Remember the recession. Lower your standards. If it’s east of that road and it has enough space, go for it. Bid on everything. Get outbid on everything. Forget about that one house. You will realise a year later that even if you had borrowed that extra €5,000, they would have outbid you forever, because the house is now palatial. Wonder if it is generational wealth or if they work for Google.
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Listen to people tell you that the elderly lady they bought their house from told them she wanted them to have it. Write nice letters to owners while estate agents shake their heads. Buy a house that doesn’t feel quite right. Weep when you get the keys, but do not expect to feel like you are at home. Look at the mortgage documents, study the payback time, and wonder if you will live that long.
Imagine that someone will gently tug open the unclosable front window and step in with spidery legs. Consider if you will ever get rid of the lingering smell of the last occupants. Realise that bleach does not erase the history of a place. Get on your knees and scrub while you wait for the feeling of home. Feel thankful and guilty for the ways that your family has helped you. Watch your husband moving around the garden.
Get tired as you run out of adrenaline. Get sick as the winter infiltrates the single panes and wall vents stuffed with old socks. Try to shake off the ongoing strain, even though you are in. You’re in! Thank the neighbours for wine and flowers. Tell them you’ll have them over when you get the place sorted, which is never. Transfer most of your salary into the mortgage account.
Reach a new level of fatigue and wonder if it is your body letting go of all the years of wishing. Spend long nights with a vice grip around your four-year-old in her newfound night terrors. Start to believe for the first time in your life that there are ghosts.
Feel a numbing exhaustion when the tank in the attic overflows through the bedroom and livingroom. Be grateful, though, that you no longer have a landlord.
Make a list of all the things that need to be fixed. Have a vision. Welcome people in for tea and listen as they suggest knocking walls and Italian tap suppliers. Talk to men with cement speckles on their trousers about steel beams and gate posts and believe them as they tell you it’s not straightforward and nothing costs less than €10,000. Choose between a new boiler or your teenager’s braces.
Don’t replace the cracked hob because it’ll turn into a €30,000 kitchen upgrade, not including the rewiring, and you’re still paying off the window loan. Remember that you’re lucky you got your windows before the company went bust. Worry when there is a meeting about retirement policies at work, and watch your boss’s face when you tell them you’ll have a mortgage until you’re 70. Lie when your husband asks if you noticed the roses blooming.
Swear when you bang your head in the black hole of the understairs and say, mark my words, if I get a stomach ulcer, it will be because of this hovel of storage. Wait two years to see if anything can be done – it can’t, sure, the whole banister would have to be ripped out, and you wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyway.
Remember some nasally fellah on the radio saying that you don’t have a space problem, you have a stuff problem. Take two trips to the recycling centre and buy a battery-powered stick-on light for under the stairs, which falls off the wall and breaks immediately when someone fires their schoolbag in. Put it in the new pile for the recycling centre.
Choose between painting the outside of the house or going on holiday for a week. Say you’ll go on holiday next year. Pick a paint colour and do a patch test above the front door. Meet a painter who says he needs to talk to the boss and looks at your husband. Look at the painter with your head cocked when your husband tells him he’ll need to talk to the boss and points at you.
Die of embarrassment when your child throws a five-litre bucket of pink paint out of the trolley on to the floor in Woodies. Upset your husband when you say the room he painted looks like Barbie’s dreamhouse.
Rage that it is €12,000 for a new bathroom. Wash the soil out of the bath again because your husband is using it to fill buckets for the garden, because you don’t have an outdoor tap.
Realise that three years have passed. At 5am, look up installing outdoor taps. Contact a man from adverts and anticipate that he’ll say you’d be better off demolishing the house altogether. Thank him, as you hand over €95 and watch your husband’s face as he talks about a garden hose. Rage at yourself for not doing it earlier.
Get off the train on a winter night and see a buttery light in the windows of your house. Notice a beautiful plant in the garden that you can’t name. Ignore the patch test above the door. Find your family eating in a room with walls adorned with Nectar Jewels #6. Realise that you’ve come far. Go back to making a list.
