House Sweet Home

Bed's made, carpets cleaned and the smell of polish covering every available surface. Shoes in the cupboard, coats hanging up and when everyone’s out, you walking around naked.

Is your house, your home?

Most people have some sort of routine... That’s life, even if you feel you haven't, you most probably have.

I often think I don't have a routine, I'm not always on time and sometimes I do things in very irregular ways. I guess a routine can be as simple as having coffee every morning, always having a shower and never skipping breakfast.

To enjoy a house the main thing you need is comfort. I'm not talking fluffy cushions, bed-spreads from John Lewis and lamp shades from Next... I mean the comfortable feeling that lives inside us. That warm haze you get from your home, that feeling you get when you've found the right house and the feeling you yearn for when you're away from it.

This feeling provides the foundations of comfort and you provide the furnishings, enabling a house to become a home.

Landscape gardeners... mainly men who don't mind getting muddy, making noise and drinking all your tea. Gardiners that like to take their time and charge for it too. Gardiners that you forget are there and soon want them to hurry up and finish!

For lack of routine in my life, I get up at different times every day. On a working morning I have to be up with an alarm, but Saturdays are bliss as I rise when I am ready.

Sundays are said to be the day of rest, I say the weekend is all about resting. Days of rest are days you can do as you please.

I am not a naked person... I can't sleep naked and usually run to the shower clutching a towel. But sometimes, when everyone is out and you wake up, it just happens.

Stumble out of bed rubbing my eyes, one foot follows the other. Walking across my room taking my boxers off as I reach my blind... rolling up the blind ready for the morning sun.

The gardeners work Saturdays.

I launch myself back making more of a show than the one the two gardeners just witnessed and the other missing the action. I sit behind my bed on the other side cringing at what just happened and daring not to look.

Yes. Yes, I just showed all that I have to three gardeners that are here for another two weeks. I just showed the people I have to make small talk with in the morning and tea for when I come home, all my morning glory.

I crawled out of my room and stayed behind walls and out of the windows site for most of the day. Praying they would hurry up and go, praying they’d finish early and keeping my blind closed.

I have now discovered a house is not a home till it is complete. Completing a house is a hard task and something that could take months, even years. You have to appreciate what you have and realise that if home is where the heart is, then work at it. A wall is not built in a day.

In the mean time remember this… nakedness is something that is better when the blinds are pulled down.