Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned That Sometimes A House Is Just A House

I sold my house this afternoon, and I felt nothing.

Well, that’s not strictly true. I felt a great many different things. It’s just that none of them were the things I thought I would feel; or more accurately, the things I thought I was supposed to feel.

My wife and I went back this morning for our final checks: to take one last meter reading; to leave the keys on the fireplace; and to make sure we hadn’t accidentally forgotten about an antique wardrobe stuffed with clothes hiding in one of the bedrooms.

As I walked around the now barren rooms (each time thinking of Rowan Atkinson’s perfect delivery of the line “Oh God, we’ve been burgled!” in Blackadder the Third), I expected to feel a sense of sadness, of loss, of grief. This was the first place my wife and I owned, instead of just renting. We brought our daughter home to this house; caught her first steps and first words in this house. We made thousands of decisions here, both momentous and mundane. The course of our lives might have been immeasurably different had we not moved there in the summer of 2021. Yet for all I poked at the old wounds, I didn’t feel so much as a tinge of nostalgia.

From time to time, I find myself thinking of the amazing opening lines of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which give the titular mansion’s very architecture an air of unnerving malevolence:

By contrast, the house at 69 Machon Bank Road felt distinctly unhaunted. Nothing walked there at all, alone or otherwise. It consisted of four tabulae rasae, punctuated by windows and doors, waiting patiently and sanely to be filled with another family’s life.

So what did I feel when we closed the door for the last time that day? Relief, mostly.

It’s been eight months since we accepted an offer on our old place. Eight months of negotiation; eight months of prodding at solicitors and real estate agents who all seemed oddly surprised by every step of the process; eight months of sleepless nights wondering that the sale would fall through. When we finally handed over the keys this afternoon, the wave of euphoria I felt was like nothing I had ever experienced. It was as if I could feel the bladder of my soul emptying after a lifetime spent wandering in search of a urinal. I practically floated out of the estate agent’s office.

But it was more than just those eight months. I realised with some shock that in the three years I lived in that house, I never felt truly comfortable. Between the noise of traffic through the barely-glazed windows and the screaming matches conducted by our shockingly inconsiderate neighbours, I spent most of my time waiting for the other shoe to drop. It feels damn good not to have the Stiletto Heel of Damocles hanging over my head anymore.

When I mentioned these feelings to my wife, she summed it up pretty succinctly: “The house was always a compromise,” she said, and she was right. We moved in when she was six months pregnant because we needed somewhere with enough space to start a family. We knew it wasn’t a forever home, so it never really became a home at all. It was always just a house.

There’s still plenty of uncertainty ahead of us. Right now we’re staying with my very kind and generous in-laws, and we still don’t know when we’ll finally get the keys to our new place. And even when we do move in, I’m sure there’ll be issues with the place that we couldn’t see through our rose-tinted glasses. But when I look at pictures of the place, it doesn’t feel like making a compromise.

It feels like a new home. And I can’t wait to start filling it up with ghosts.