Getting the Keys . .

There’s something very strange about an entirely empty house.

How quickly a home becomes just a shell.  

Without people, without furniture and all those other treasures and items collected over the years that make it a family’s; it simply reduces to four walls.

When we first stepped into Hare House as owners, it had lain empty for six weeks.  It was cold and there were cobwebs everywhere.  Strange how quickly they’d formed.  But the views across the fields we’d fallen in love with were there.

The second day we returned with the children.  It’s very hard for them to comprehend that we will be altering the house.  That it won’t always have an orange and brown kitchen or turquoise carpets.  Having never done this before it’s hard enough for us as adults to get our heads around our plans, let alone a five and seven year old.  They can’t quite understand why we’re moving from a gorgeous, cosy two hundred year old beamed cottage into an empty house.  

But we focused on the parts that would sell it to them - the big garden that sits all around the house, the bedrooms twice the size of their current ones, “yes, ignore the sink in the corner’, ‘ no, we won’t keep this carpet, don’t worry’  And the beautiful views from the front, back and sides across the surrounding fields.  

Then there were two things I did almost immediately - get the heating on!  What a difference a bit of heat makes.  Suddenly an empty house doesn’t feel quite so miserable.  The second thing I did was to place a diffuser in every room of the house so it started to smell a bit more loved and lived in.  My two littles are really sensitive to smell so I wanted to ensure the house smelt beautiful.  It now smells so lovely when you walk in that we’ve had delivery men, stand in the hallway sniffing and exclaiming how gorgeous it smells!  That’s not a bad result!