September | 2014 | we bought a french house

Sorry I haven’t blogged for ages. So long in fact that the interface on wordpress has totally changed since the last time I blogged.

I received an email this week from a friend who has just moved into a new house, well it’s an old house, that needs quite a bit of work. “Please come over, and give us the White renovation pep talk,” he suggested. “Reassure us that it will all be OK one day.”

Which got me thinking of the days when our French house was hideous. And I would cry and wonder why the hell we had done this. Check out these pics for example.

Or for those who can’t be bothered to click on the link.. this was once my dining room!

So I gave him my five point plan for renovation motivation or moreover things I say but don’t always do or feel but they sound like sage advice!

1) Make one room nice straight away. Then you have somewhere to sit in the evening and watch TV or drink wine, or both. In the case of France this was our kitchen as it was the only room with a working fire. In UK renovations I’d go for the sitting room as I am assuming you have heating and/or running water. If not then I salute you.

The fire we huddled around for the first six months

2) Sort out a shower. Showers are on that Maslow’s Triangle of needs. Well if they aren’t they should be. Maybe Maslow was more of a bath man? If you have a working shower with nice tiles and some Aveda shampoo you can face anything. So get thee to bathstore.com or victoriaplumb.com for affordable bathroom fittings and do it asap. You can always upgrade to fancy Duravit stuff in a few years time.

My bathstore.com bathroom in London – done in haste but enjoyed every day!

3) Remember that the reason you bought a house that needed work is because you couldn’t afford the same size house all done up or because you knew that buying a wreck can mean potential money making opportunities. And then think about how cramped you’d all be living in a high spec penthouse with all mod cons. You see – you feel better already!

4) Only invite people around in the early days who appreciate the joys of a project. People like Peter and I in fact. We will swoon over your peeling paint and original features. We will talk about potential. We will be jealous of the fact you are at the beginning of a renovation project and not nearing the end of it. (I still have wallpapers, tiles etc that I have nowhere to put now in France and entire pinterest boards devoted to rooms that don’t even exist!)

5) In the case of my male friend who was asking my advice on the above I pointed out that the best thing he can do is to accept at all times that whenever his wife has had a bad day, or is fed up with bare floorboards when all her friends have Fired Earth tiles, it is HIS FAULT. ALL OF IT! That way everyone is happy. See – I’ve cracked this renovation malarky….

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

And so it was this summer…. After ten years as the editor of Company Magazine, I returned from a short early visit to France, leaving behind my husband and sons for their third feral summer without me, to be given the news that the print version of the magazine was to be closed down. And in a strange way I wasn’t that surprised, not shocked, certainly not angry, but sad that something which has been part of my life for as long as my eldest son (I became editor shortly after giving birth to him!) was suddenly not to be. My team, some of whom I have worked with every day for 5-10 years, would be working on other mags, living their lives somewhere where I wouldn’t hear as they gossip about husbands, boyfriends, flatmates in my earshot every day. The walk from Charing Cross to my office in Soho that I have trudged through sunshine and sometimes snow for 10 years might now be a different commute. It might be no commute at all. And all those years of worrying about circulation figures or advertising revenues were for the time being a thing of the past.

But the news, which for the first few weeks I had to keep secret, meant that my summer being single had taken a very different turn. My usual three weeks of partying, seeing friends I don’t normally have time to see or just going a little big wild for a few weeks were off the agenda. I couldn’t really see anyone for fear of getting drunk and blurting out my secret. And, my emotional state was just too fragile to face most people anyway – especially not in a chi chi Soho bar/restaurant. So instead I stayed home and watched an entire season of 24 on Apple TV. I drank too much wine and to counterbalance this I went running a lot. Run, drink. Drink, run. And luckily I was allowed to bring one friend into my circle of knowledge, one of my besties who also edits a magazine within the same company so was deemed a safe confidente. And so every few nights I would go and stay with Lorraine and her four offspring – with my goddaughter Mabel donating her new bed to me complete with pink princess bedding. And then Lorraine and I drank wine together – which somehow doesn’t seem so bad as drinking wine alone. And Gracie, her second eldest said “do you two do anything except drink wine?” and so indignantly, we started going to ‘Pyscle’ (spinning in the dark!) together on a Tuesday morning before work to add to my extreme binge/purge summer. Or we baked with the kids and watched Johnny English. And we talked and talked about change and life and jobs and kids. So by the time I did announce the sad news to my team almost three weeks later – I had ‘worked through it’ as they say in the US. And I hope, in doing so, I was able to help them face this enormous change with a sense of strength and calm (and a weight loss of about half a stone!)

And then finally, I got to go back to my boys and my French home – where everything is always alright and Arthur asked if this meant I would have to give my iPad back and wether he would still get to go to X Factor. And Sebastian wondered what would happen to Tanita my Creative Director’s giant pencil that sits on her desk. And I realised that none of it really matters anyway except having amazing friends and family around you and a sense of self outside of what you do for a living. Most of all, I realised that what this actually marks is a new chapter. A new adventure and that can only be a good thing right?

“Just when the caterpillar thought their world had ended. They became a butterfly…” Anon