Things that strike me

This lack of twitter means I’m getting great stuff done here.

Anyway I am sitting in a sunny kitchen which will not be mine for the rest of my life – I know this already – and am pondering ways to get what I want which is a nice house, with a decent kitchen from IKEA (seriously) and a nice workspace and I have realised that one of my key cribs about living in Ireland is we do as little as we can get away with. And then we try to convince ourselves that it’s enough.

I’m in a three bedroomed semiD house. It came with fitted furniture in the box room which was a drag for me because if it hadn’t, it would have been cleared out to make My room. I have a bedroom but past experience has taught me that’s lunacy to try and use that as an office as well as a sleeping area. In other words, keep the computer out of the bedroom, there’s a good girl.

Most Irish houses are not built with the idea that someone might need a home office and our insane tendency – which is dissipating admittedly – to judge house sizes by the numbers of bedrooms they have rather than their actual floorspace area – means that offices are rarely considered as a vital part of a house. I hate this idea.

I was looking at these things yesterday. Apparently they are seriously pricy but that’s fine. I can’t afford a garden to put one in yet either so I can look but not touch.

I want a nice house. I’m trying to figure out how to get it and to do that, I need to figure out what I really want from it. Workspace. Storage. Nice kitchen. I wouldn’t want all these things 15 years ago. I was happy with “enough”. But I’ve lived in a lot of places and in some respects, enough in Ireland isn’t really enough.I know I have to make compromises but still.

Anyway.

Basically I think the problem is it’s easy to slip into a rhythm of life and only later do you realise it wasn’t what you really wanted. I remember about 8 years ago a mortgage lender in AIB told me his days were filled with people who had taken out mortgages in their early twenties frantically looking for equity releases to go off and travel because they had done the right thing when they were young except it wasn’t really the right thing for them.

If there’s a moral to this, it’s that although I feel screwed over by what happened in Ireland for the last 8 years in the property market, it’s that I still think that stepping away from it was the right thing. I have a lot of beauty in my life and for that I am thankful.