My inability to choose the right house, but I love it…..

I was looking through the apps on my iPad yesterday and suddenly saw one for my Home Insurance…..it got me wondering how long I’d actually been in my village house….it must be more than a year, I thought to myself, but couldn’t work out how long. So I had to fo some digging amongst paperwork to find out…turns out ivebeen here almost 4 years to the day…😳😳😱😱😳😳😱😱…how can that be? Sometimes it feels like I’ve been here forever, other times, like I moved in yesterday…….how weird to think it’s 4 years…that totally shocked me and I had to check other paperwork to make sure it was true!

Anyway, the reason for typing this was when I looked around my house yesterday and realised how totally inappropriate a choice it was for me when I did move here….as I stopped to draw breathe at the top of the stairs 🙄

and looked out onto my garden that needed tidying…again…..

But would I change it and move again…?…..well I never say never any more, but I very much doubt it.

I’d spent my life loving the opportunity to move to a new house. The new adventure of discovering a new area, a new house to make my own, all the work needing to be done and doing most myself. I adored that part. But when I chose this house, me and my daughters just didn’t realise I just wasn’t capable of making the right choice. Dementia had already taken that logical ability away from me….we just didn’t know it at the time..

I clearly remember standing in front of the big picture window in the living room, staring out at the view, and saying, “I love it, this is perfect’. I doubt whether I’d taken any notice of the rest of the house. The 3 bedrooms I didn’t need, the gardens I certainly didn’t need, the steps I would trip up and down outside. So much was wrong, yet that one view sold it to me.

I live upstairs when I’m there during the day and chose the room at the front as my room. I could have chosen the bigger room at the back with the fitted wardrobes  but the one at the front has the same view as the living room, only higher, so what’s not to like….?

I had to move to a cheaper area to pay off my mortgage. It was an expensive village so I had to choose the cheapest house in a beautiful village. I was lucky and had enough money to pay for the path at the front to be widened. I was continually making eye contact with the garden at each side as I wobbled over, so it had to be done. But the workmen put tramlines either side for me to follow so I don’t think I’ve fallen in since….🤔 well I did keep tripping up the steps so I just painted luminous yellow stripes down each, so they help now…..mmmm looking at this piccie, they need a refresh me thinks…

I couldn’t see the grab rail up the stairs as it was pure white and blended into the walls, so I stuck some blue electric tape at regular intervals and had another grab rail fitted the other side, so I use both to climb the stairs now and just accept that I’ll be puffed when I reach the top…

And the big spare room is my memory room where the walls are covered with photos and boxes of memories to calm me on a bad day

The small spare room an office that I don’t really need…

But we are where we are. The thought of the trauma of moving and getting use to somewhere new means it’s no longer an option, so we adapt as the challenges appear….

I could easily live in a one bedroom house, all on one level…..the ideal….but I don’t. Sometimes we make bad choices in life without realising it at the time. It’s how you deal with those bad choices that turn it into a success……..or a manageable success…….and how could I move from my view or my village……especially on such a lovely sunny autumn day…