What next?

After Fidd died I felt weightless for a while; untethered. I thought about locking up the house, leaving my job and going away to the other side of the planet. I had a tempting invitation to South Africa, to visit one of my oldest friends, and then I wondered about Australia, where I have many dear friends from Asia days who I almost never see anymore. How nice would it be to leap to another continent, another season?

But I am not weightless, even though his absence leaves me without my anchor. I have family, dogs, colleagues, friends and the house. The house. I was never going to disappear – it was just a briefly comforting mirage.

In fact I re-started work on the house the week after he died. I needed to get a temporary door on the extension and the downstairs loo plumbed in to cope with all the guests we had for the funeral, and after that, the decorators carried on making the side of the house that used to be Number 2 into more of a liveable space. 

I also spent a lot of time talking to people who had worked on the house with us before: Mark, our architect (and also one of Fiddian’s oldest friends), Tom, our builder, James and Tim, our joiners and then Rob our electrician and Malcolm our plumber, as well as Tash, our decorator, who has done an awful lot to keep me sane these past few months and Sam, another friend who is going to build my kitchen. Over the course of these conversations I asked a lot of questions and took a lot of notes, gradually building up a schedule of works of what needed to be done to get the new side of the house ready so that I can move over into it and Tom and his crew can make a start on demolishing the floors in the side that used to be Number 1 and start renovating that to match the completed side.

When Fiddian was alive, project managing the house build was essentially his full-time job. He did a huge amount of the design, specification and thinking work behind every detail, and because of his background as a carpenter, he did a lot of practical building work as well. He talked to me about most of it, and consulted me on almost all of it, but I was busy with my full-time job, running the house and studying art part time, so although I paid fairly close attention I certainly wasn’t aware of all the details, and a lot of what he told me went in one ear and out of the other. I also didn’t experience the sense of responsibility for it all that often kept him awake at night (and which now keeps me awake at night).

The work we had already completed on the house since we bought it in May 2022 involved five big stages, some of which were carried out concurrently:

• planning application and approval (9 months as our first set of plans were rejected)
• rebuilding the entire roof (7 months)
• groundworks – installing a biodigester sewage treatment system, French drains around the whole house and digging boreholes for the heat pump and water (3-4 months)
• laying a concrete slab and building a brand new kitchen/dining extension onto the side of the existing house (6 months)
• making the existing walls wind and watertight, repointing, insulating, slate hanging and replacing all doors and windows with new triple-glazed ones (12 months on and off)

Most of this work had been completed when Fiddian died, and for the three months leading up to October he had been working with joiners and plasterers on the internal works on the extension side of the house, readying it for us to move over about now so that work could begin on the interior of the side we had been living in. The remaining work is a bit less intensive than before (jackhammers rather than diggers), but will initially involve a lot of demolition so that we can lay underfloor heating pipes across the whole slab and connect up the ground source heat pump. There is also quite a bit of internal structural change required in the new hallway and stairs that will open the space up and make it much lighter inside.

My plan at the moment is to stick to the original plan – finish the works on the new side and move over into it, hopefully by March. Then Tom and his team will come back and begin the demolition work which will eventually enable the house to become one house again, with modern heating and air circulation systems that should hopefully keep the house warm and dry over the coming decades. Our work will restore this house, preserve it and make it fit for modern living. 

Whether it will be me who ends up living in it is not a question I feel ready to grapple with at the moment. But I do know I need to finish the job. I don’t really have a choice, for one thing. The housing market here is in the doldrums. Even perfectly well preserved houses aren’t selling. No one wants to buy someone else’s half-finished project. And abandoning it now would feel like a terrible betrayal of the original vision that Fiddian and I had. Still, as my mind churns at 3am I do wonder what the fuck I am doing spending all this effort and money on a house that seems so ill-suited for a sad single woman and two little dogs. It is enormous and empty and expensive. It is also beautiful, unique and full of promise, and the main way I have of continuing my love affair with the crazy man who persuaded me that buying it was a good idea.