I got to live in my dream house for two days, and it basically ruined my life

The absolute indignity of returning to a house that doesn’t have a boot room

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a thread on Mumsnet (Don’t look at me like that: it’s comedy gold over there some days¹…) about why some people aspire to owning large houses, rather than being content with smaller, more “modest” homes, and because this was Mumsnet, where everyone is better than you me, the general consensus was that no decent person would ever want to live in a big house, because that would be vulgar and showy, and it’s far more noble to have a “modest” home (the word “modest” came up a lot in this conversation) that’s just big enough for your requirements — or maybe even slightly smaller, actually, because that sounds even better, like something Mother Theresa would say.

Needless to say I… don’t relate to this at all. At all.

I want to live in a big house. A huge, rambling one, with more bathrooms than bedrooms, and enough space that I could have guests over and never even know they were there. I think about this fictional house a lot. It’s kind of a hobby of mine, Sometimes I even go onto Rightmove and filter the results from high to low, in the hope of finding it. (Not so I can buy it, obviously, because I’m not a multimillionaire, but just to reassure myself that it’s out there, and that one day it might be mine…) Then, this week, I not only found it; I actually got to stay in it…

AS HAPPY AS CLAMS IN OUR HOUSE OF DREAMS

It more or less ruined my life.

The thing is, even though this house (Which you can find here, by the way…) wasn’t, as Max kept insisting, “a mansion” (It has five bedrooms, which is large, obviously, but not MANSION large…), it was perfect. It had a giant kitchen, with two of everything — two dishwashers, two stoves, two toasters, two kettles... There was also two living rooms, a dining room with a table big enough to seat fourteen, a luxury bathroom for each bedroom, and — get this, people — even a boot room.

A BOOT room.

A BOOT ROOM

I think it was the boot room that did it, to be honest. Because, as soon as I laid eyes on it, with its giant storage cupboard and its own attached bathroom, I knew my life would not be complete until I owned a boot room of my own.

“I feel like you’d know you’d really made it if you had enough space in your house to have a room JUST for your boots and coats,” I told Terry. “It’s like the pinnacle of my ambition now.” And yes, yes, I know there are plenty of other, far more important things that might tell me I’d ‘made it’. I know that if I were to post this on Threads, for instance, I’d have a lot of very young, very earnest people all lining up to tell me that, why, I’ve ALREADY made it, because I have so many things in my life that other people do not, so I should be content with those things, and not have the temerity to want anything more. They would go on to say that money doesn’t buy happiness, and that things like health and family are far more important, and all of this would be totally true. Of course it would.

But screw it: I want a house with a boot room. I don’t know how to go on living without one. It’s intolerable, people. Intolerable. It is not to be borne.² And, sure, health is more important than houses, but it’s not like it’s an either/or kind of situation, is it? It’s not like you have to pick one, and that’s it. We’re not living in a Grimms fairytale, after all. I feel like it should be OK to want to have your health AND a cool, kick-ass house, and I DO want those things, because that’s the kind of person I am. And I don’t want the house so I can impress people with it, or anything like that: I just want it because I’ve long suspected that life would be better if we lived in the lap of luxury, and this week has served to confirm that YES, it very much WOULD.

Look at how happy I am in bathroom # 5!

Now that we’re home, though, I’m going to have to settle for what I can get, which it turns out is a bottle of £20 hand wash which is the same as the one they had in the House of Dreams, so now every time I wash my hands I can feel like I’m back there. Once I’m a bit richer, I’ll get the shower gel to go with it, and when I’m a millionaire, I’ll ALSO get the shampoo and conditioner — possibly in the 2000 ml version, which I will store in the room next to my boot room.

Honestly, this is why I should never go on holiday, really. Even when it’s just a two night trip, I always come home wanting to change my life — or, failing that, my house. It’s very expensive. Especially that time I came back from L.A. and persuaded Terry to build me a set of custom shoe shelves.

But anyway. The good news is that we didn’t almost burn down the House of Dreams like we did the converted abbey, so at least that’s something. The HoD lives on to host other families, and I’ve already started trying to persuade various family members that we should all club together to rent it for, like, a month or something. Or forever, say. That would work for me too.

Where do you stand on the big house/small house debate, though? Do you ALSO want to one day live in a McMansion, or are you normal? Please do tell…

Until next week,

1. Like the time during a ‘do you make visitors take their shoes off’ post when one woman was so keen to emphasize how much BETTER she was than everyone else that she claimed to give her dog a shower at least once a day; often by bringing him in with her

2. This is obvious hyperbole being used for dramatic effect. Please don’t come at me…