Oversized houses on undersized sections

I live in one of those neighbourhoods where the houses are too big for the sections. The houses are free-standing but they are close together; mostly they just have a metre or two of outdoor space around the house and maybe a few square metres in the front yard, and half of it is concreted, and I was hanging my sheets out on the line last weekend and I could see right into the neighbour’s concreted backyard where he was pottering around doing something I pretended not to notice and have since forgotten. The houses seem oversized because there’s hardly any space between them, and when I say oversized, I mean, these places are huge. We live in a 5 bed 2.5 bath and it’s smaller than many others in the surrounding streets. I can’t quite comprehend what people do with the larger houses, because it’s probably not that they have heaps of children. Does each member of the household get their own bathroom and their own hobby room as well as their own bedroom? Our garage is bigger than our outdoor area and the internal stairs and landings feel unnecessarily wide considering their only purpose is to take us from one level to another. There are three levels in this house, by the way, with a lot of foyer and landing and hallway, and we have a room in between the dining room and the living room which is half filled with bookshelves and half empty because there’s just that much space. It’s the biggest house I’ve ever lived in, and the second nicest (some may disagree if they don’t like old houses but the nicest house I ever lived in was a renovated villa).

Parts of this suburb make me think of Edward Scissorhands; you know that scene where you see his neighbourhood from above and all the pastel cars pull out of their identical driveways at the same time? This bit:

Other parts of my suburb are older and less uniform but it is still a strange place, and don’t get me wrong, I’m lucky to live in a place like this, and our house is comfortable and spacious, and I’m happy here, but something doesn’t feel quite right to me. It feels like a neighbourhood for a film set, where a body is found in a garage and there are signs of a struggle and everyone says “we never thought something like that could happen here” and “I didn’t hear a thing” but they quietly start to wonder how long it would be before someone found their corpse and eyeing up the people they know like “actually yeah, they would be capable of that” and then they go back to vacuuming their second car. We’re all putting on a show, which feels a lot like adulthood in general, we’re all putting on a show of it, weeding the gap between the concrete and the bottom of the fence, putting the rubbish bins out on the same spot on the verge every Sunday evening, going to work as if we have a clue.

I can’t identify why exactly it doesn’t feel “quite right” or what would feel “quite right”. I could point to something being off about every place I’ve lived so clearly it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. Or maybe the problem is just that I’ve always known I’ll have to leave one day, leave every place I’ve ever lived. I live in a rich neighbourhood that I could never afford to buy a house in and my child has never been to school here. He goes to school in town, the halfway point between his divorced parents’ houses. I know a few people here but I never see them. When I drive down the road I look around in amazement at the faux-grand facades and I know I don’t belong but here I am anyway. I don’t have the money to belong here, and I think that’s the root of it. I’m an imposter, a single mother on a single salary squashing into a large family home with three other adults and my teenaged son because none of us could afford to live here on our own. I’m in the “I hope my car bill isn’t too high otherwise I might have to sell it” tax bracket, which although not entirely comfortable is quite a step up from the “I’ll walk because I can’t afford the bus fare” bracket that I existed in for a while.

When I failed to buy a house at the beginning of the year, and moved into this flat (lucky, so lucky, to be welcomed here) I spent some of my savings on making my room a haven. I had resigned myself to continuing to rent, and decided that since my savings couldn’t get me the security of a house, at least they could get me a nice bedroom. I bought a new mattress for the first time in my life, and a new bed base, and I bought several lamps secondhand because I don’t like the ceiling light, and ordered pretty new bedding in pink because if I’d bought a house I would have painted my whole room in limewash pink.

Accent wall before and after

I asked if I could repaint the accent wall in my room once I’d seen it, because I can’t abide red, especially that maroon red that was all the rage in the early 2000s, and the landlord said yes, so I painted it in a dark denim blue, because if I’d bought a house I would have used a blue like that somewhere. I had enough paint that later when my flatmate and I built bookshelves, there was plenty for that project too.

The bookshelves my friend and I built from scratch with plywood from Bunnings.

After two years of living fairly frugally by choice in preparation for buying a house, and many years before that living extremely frugally because I was poor, I wanted to be comfortable where I am right now. Future be damned. Losing a dream makes you reckless. As Linda Tirado said:

I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don’t pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It’s not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn’t that I blow five bucks at Wendy’s. It’s that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to.

So I bought myself these nice things, and I didn’t have to put any of them on Afterpay because I had house money sitting there, and it does mean I have to build my savings back up if I ever hope to buy a house in the future, but I don’t really any more. Hope, that is. I will be sensible though. I got used to the feeling of having savings, and I liked it, I like knowing I can actually pay the car bill and save for plane tickets to Australia to meet my first baby niece when she arrives this year and give my son money for the school cafeteria knowing there is enough leftover. It feels incredibly rich to me, to have enough, even though I live in an oversized house I could never afford in a neighbourhood I don’t belong in and still worry most days about the future until I stuff those feelings down again and remind myself of all the reasons I have to be grateful, of how lucky I am. I’m surrounded by the kind of wealth I can’t ever imagine having, but I’m also far better off than I used to be and I appreciate that every day. Every day.

My desk

I splurged on making my bedroom pretty and cosy, and it worked, even though there is still a box in the corner to unpack, and my togs and towels have been strewn across my dresser for two weeks when it would only take ten seconds to put them in my swimming bag in the closet, and all my pictures are leaning against the foot of the bed while the walls remain bare. I built myself a large desk and put a plant and a lamp and my books about writing on it. Often when I wake up in my soft bed with the pillows that are just right and look at the morning light through my window, I just lie there doing nothing more than feeling comfortable. I mean, really feeling it. My bed is a tiny island of luxury, a place that is mine, and I don’t know what it would take to really feel at home somewhere, like I belong there and have a right to stay, but I imagine it would be something like my bed, only larger.