The small house

Clare Harris
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

This tale is subtitled ‘A quest for an organised life’. It’s a subtitle, because we’re nowhere near a conclusion yet.

Around five years ago, we moved from a classic Glasgow tenement — all high ceilings, lashings of light and lofty views — to a dinky 1960s terrace. It was tucked away at the top of a cul-de-sac, a place we never knew existed if we hadn’t spotted it on RightMove search. We’d been looking for a place with more bedrooms. Kids had happened. Rather, one kid. And at that point, we were hoping for another.

The beauty of a tenement flat is its space. These graceful monuments of mass habitation were thrown up by the Victorians at an incredible rate during the city’s industrial boom era. The streets are lined with them. They’re built in honey blonde or rosy red sandstone, and they’re easy to love. Some were better constructed than others; you hear of today’s builders unearthing rolled up newspapers from within tenement walls, put there as a cost-cutting form of padding out the stone. And now, some are better maintained than others — cries of ‘slum landlord’ still abound in some areas of the city, despite concentric circles of crackdown to do away with scenes of squalor that would better suit the dark days of the 1960s. By and large, however, the sort of tenement flat that we had our eyes on are at a premium. We quickly discovered that our aspirations to one of these three-bedroom, large-halled, elegant dwellings lay somewhere far beyond our budget. To be fair, our aspirations had been unrealistically skewed. We’d just spent six months temporarily living in leafy north London for reasons too complicated to go into here. There, Messrs Farrow, Ball, Little and Greene had lurked on every corner. Basement conversions abounded. Folk did their weekly shop in Waitrose. We had been living life through a prism of terribly tasteful middle-class comfort (with a credit card bill to match). On our return to Glasgow, that prism cracked, and was ground quickly into a soggy mush under our feet as we tramped the damp West of Scotland streets.

Long story short. We got used to Glasgow again (it didn’t take long). We got the 1960s terrace, for less than the price of a nice two-bed tenement. And ever since we’ve been loving it and scratching our heads about it in equal measure. How to fit a bunch of energetic five-year-olds around the kitchen table? How to invite our motley bunch of friends (and offspring) around for a Christmas do without ending up squeezed like sardines into the living room? We have reluctantly realised that we can’t. But there’s a lot that we can do with this house. And a whole lot to learn when I take a break from Pinterest and think about how we got here in the first place. More, to come.

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