Living alone for the first time hasn’t been easy. I’ve had to teach myself how to do it, and now that I’ve just finished a 4 month stint of almost back-to-back house sitting for my clients, I’m having to relearn how to do it again. You see, since coming back home, I haven’t been feeling quite like myself, but before we unpack that in Part 2, let me tell you a little bit about The Bachelorette Pad, as I like to call it.
When I first viewed the bachelorette pad, it was a dive. Small, damp, dingy and unloved by the previous tenant, it was that classic sitcom scene where the girl thinks to herself “I can’t live here!” but she grits her teeth and says “I’ll take it.” Renting with pets is hard. It’s no exaggeration when I tell you that I rang to enquire about more than forty different flats, only to be told that pets wouldn’t be considered. So despite the flat not making a great first impression, I took it on the spot and set about turning it into a cosy and beautiful space for me and my boys.
When I started house-hunting, I had dreams of a feminine home, with clear worktops and sides, floor space, cosy rugs, artwork on the walls and scented candles making the place smell divine. What I got was two rooms with a shower cubicle and a hint of stale cigarette smoke from my downstairs neighbour. I have been keeping a dream home scrap book, filled with magazine clippings for a few years and home making has always been one of my favourite things. I love moving house because I love to find homes for things and make a space look homely. I love to tidy and organise and for everything to have a designated home. So this pokey flat was the ultimate challenge in home making and within a few short weeks, I had transformed it into a cosy, calm space, adorned with fairy lights and blankets.
As an aside, before I had any furniture other than a chest of drawers and a glass fronted, mirror backed display cabinet that I rehomed from someone’s driveway, Watson and I had our very cute seventh date in this flat. I was still living at my friend’s house and borrowed all of her spare bedding and sofa cushions for the night. Watson came over to an almost empty flat and me grinning like a five year old announcing, “We’re building a blanket fort!” which we did. It was christened The Blanket Cathedral, as the arched doors of the glass fronted cabinet gave it a somewhat ecclesiastical feel. The inside featured a bed made of many duvets and blankets, a headboard made of sofa cushions and every set of fairy lights I own. It was quite magical. We ordered Dominoes and ate gingerbread biscuits I had made along to biscuit week of The Great British Bake Off, having spent the previous week at his eating chocolate cake he’d made to accompany cake week.
The crowning achievement of this flat has to be my kitchen island, although the bathroom is a close second. I have always wanted an island. I love to cook and like to spread out when I do so. I find fewer things in life more frustrating than taking a hot tray out of the oven and having nowhere to set it down. (That’s a lie. I can think of plenty of things that are far more frustrating.) A couple of years ago, in my previous life, I passed a skip with two perfectly good worktops sitting in it. They were pretty; white with sparkly bits and I couldn’t believe someone was just throwing them out. I asked the skip’s owner if I could take them away and after giving me a funny look, she said yes. So I took them home, much to Mr Ex’s bemusement. I sat the largest one directly on top of our kitchen worktop which was a horrible, dark green colour and it brightened up the kitchen immensely. The smaller of the two lived in our attic until I moved out and took them with me.
To make my island, I bought budget versions of Ikea kallax units from B&M (a fraction of the price but you get what you pay for in terms of quality). I have two 3x3 cube units that stand back to back in the middle of my kitchen/living space and one 3x2 unit that stands at the end so that I have 270◦ storage. The largest worktop sits on top, giving me ample workspace for preparing food. Then I have a separate 3x2 cube unit against one wall with the smaller worktop on top which is my “appliance zone”. I always wanted one of these too; a designated space where my mixer and food processor could live, always plugged in and ready to be used in situ so that I don’t have to move them in order to use them, because they’re heavy! I can’t tell you how many recipes I’ve wanted to make and haven’t bothered because it would involved getting the mixer down off of a shelf or out of a cupboard.
Despite the obvious work that went into the kitchen, it has really only been a case of clever furniture placement, the bathroom on the other hand received far more attention in the form of DIY. After repainting the entire flat, I regrouted my shower because the existing grout was patchy and mouldy and one tile was wobbly. Such a simple fix but one that has made the most difference in the flat. Then I hung wooden shelves with sleek black metal brackets (again, a bargain from B&M), put up a black framed mirror over my sink and a full size black framed mirror on the wall opposite, swapped out the yellowing, once-white light pull for a new black one and accessorised with pink bath mats to hide the ugly floor tiles. The piste de resistance is the sparkly silver toilet seat.
There are fairy lights everywhere. I love them and firmly believe that they are not just for Christmas. Lighting is so important in making a house a home and for me, makes all the difference. The final piece of the puzzle was the bed. When I first moved in, I was given three chests of drawers by one of my clients. I configured them in such a way that I could lay a single mattress on top on them like a bed frame, thus saving vital floor space by having all of my storage underneath my bed. I was very proud of this space saving solution for weeks, until Watson came to watch the Great British Bake Off Final and we were squeezed onto a single bed watching the final on my phone (I don’t own a TV…).
The final straw with the bed came in the New Year when I stayed with my godmother in the New Forest for a weekend. Barney has always been a bed hog and he spent that entire weekend alternating between roasting himself in front of her wood burner and burying himself in my double bed. Seeing how much he loves a big bed made me realise that the one thing I could do to help him settle in the flat would be to buy him a double bed. That’s right folks, I bought my dog a double bed. At this time, the dogs were coming to work with me all day everyday and they were getting fed up of it so I wanted them to be completely comfortable and settled in the flat before I started leaving at home during the day. Oddly, upgrading to a double bed has actually made the bedroom feel bigger, even though there is considerably less floor space now. It certainly feels more grown up.
And so, after spending my entire adult life sharing a house with a partner, I was living alone for the first time and at first it was a massive relief. The joy I felt at coming home to an empty flat that was all my own was incomparable. I loved not having to compromise on décor, or furniture placement and there was no one to ask me what was for dinner tonight. If something was a mess, it was my mess. I didn’t have to pick up after anyone else and if I didn’t want to do the washing up, I didn’t have to. To be fair, I never had to pick up after Mr Ex and if I hadn’t wanted to do the washing up back then, he wouldn’t have minded at all. It was only me holding myself to those standards, not him and if I really wanted him to, he would cook. But even so, living alone for the first time was thrilling right up until I finally ran out of jobs to do.
It was the run up to Christmas when I moved in and so there was plenty to do. Presents to buy and wrap, winding down the business for Christmas along with buying bits for the flat and putting the finishing touches to it before Watson saw it fully furnished for the first time (he went away for work for a month after our blanket fort date). I spent Christmas with my mum in Wales and came back home to see in the New Year with Watson but the night that I got back from my mums and I was finally alone with nothing to do, I began to feel really, really lonely.
When you’ve always lived with someone, even when there’s nothing to do, there’s always someone to do nothing with. Someone to ask “what shall we do?” Even just being in the same house as someone while you’re doing something relaxing like reading a book, feels very different to reading alone. Suddenly the weight of what I had done in the past year, leaving Mr Ex, moving out, getting my own place and being completely financially independent, running my own business hit me like a tonne of bricks and I felt completely adrift.
I knew this would happen and so I wasn’t completely unprepared for it, in fact I had spent the previous eight months preparing for it. Even so, that first night of feeling properly lonely was a tough one and the next day I set about putting into practice everything I had learned about how not to be lonely when you live on your own.
To be continued…
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