I was worried about living with strangers – but now I realise they come with unexpected perks
My flatmates solve my bills crisis but, better still, they make living in the cottage more fun. They fill it with energy, stories and life. A new, strange kind of family – but with people I like! We are an odd combination – a married man in his 50s with a gaggle of children, me – a 40-year-old pseudo divorcée – and a single girl of 23… but somehow it works. Perhaps our differences are the reason.
Every day at 5am, Rob gets up to stoke the fire I left burning when I went to bed, before heading out to whatever building project he’s on that day. Claire commutes to a job in a town nearby; her car pulling out of the drive at 9am is my signal to get up. During the day, I get the cottage to myself. We collide again at night, usually in the kitchen where hopefully Rob is cooking, because Claire and I never have any food in.
Living with Rob might be the first time I’ve lived with a proper grown-up since I left home as a teenager. Someone who plans and makes actual meals rather than playing Ready Steady Cook with the fridge; who can impart practical advice based on his experience (very useful for tackling the damp); who always has a decent bottle of wine open.
It makes me realise that I have never been out with anybody older than me (my fiancé was six years younger) and perhaps it might be quite nice. When a friend comes to stay and shamelessly flirts with Rob over dinner (which he cooks) I’m surprised to find I’m annoyed. Am I jealous? Not that he notices, as he chatters away about his children and his wife.
Some of my friends are concerned to hear I have moved a random man into the house. “Have you run a background check on him?” Martin wants to know, as if I am suddenly MI5. I do try. I run a Google search and make a big fuss of asking for references, but ultimately I go on my hunch. It’s hard to know on paper who you can share your space with.
I admit I was worried about sharing my cottage with strangers. I haven’t shared a flat for almost a decade. As soon as I could afford to rent my own place in London, I quickly did – moving from a derelict pub with eight flatmates into a tiny studio.
Back then I was desperate to get my own home, where the sink wasn’t full of other people’s washing-up and things didn’t disappear from the fridge. I dreamed of a desk at a window. But now I’m surprised by how much I enjoy having flatmates around again, and I get excited at the thought of them coming home each day so I can show off whatever DIY project I’ve been up to.
Luckily my new flatmates are surprisingly tolerant of my efforts to do up the house. Claire is used to coming home to find I’ve taken furniture out to the garden to paint, or am laying a drive. They get on board with my projects. When I decided to save money on oil by running the house on wood, utilising the back boiler on the wood burner, they put up with ice-cold showers on the mornings when I misjudged how many logs heating the water tank will take. Rob’s early-morning fire routine means Claire can wash before work. When I stock up on timber, which is dumped on the lawn, Claire spends hours wheeling a wheelbarrow back and forth across the garden, creating a giant log stack.
Meanwhile, I turn to an app called TaskRabbit to get things done around my cottage beyond my skill set. It is a sort of network of helpers, which allows you to book people to do random jobs. I used it in London, too, when I moved into my flat to get people to help put pictures and curtain rails up. Once my ex used it to book someone to come over and erect our new bed, then felt rather emasculated when a woman arrived to do it.
While I’d used TaskRabbit in the city for yonks, it only recently opened up to rural areas, having seen an increased demand from newly located city-dwellers (like me). It takes me a while to find a Tasker willing to come all the way to my rural cottage, especially one who can do all the random bits of DIY I need, but in the end a pair of attractive Spanish carpenters agree to come and help me out.
In a couple of days they make short work of installing a wooden worktop in my kitchen to replace the old units I enthusiastically pulled out, and putting up a series of shelves using pretty antique brass brackets I found in vintage shops. They replaster the kitchen walls, destroyed by the mess I made when I ripped off the tiles using my pink crowbar, and even smooth over the terrible plastering job I made of the dining room.
Although the point of using the app is that you can hire people to just come and do a few hours’ work, they do such a good job that I hire them to come back again to sand and fill the holes in the wooden windows (having discovered it would cost me some £15,000 to get them replaced).
Little by little, things at the cottage seem to be falling into place. Now my house seems less a project and more of a life. With things at home more settled I decide perhaps it’s time to go on a date, and try another piece of technology that’s revolutionised country life – Muddy Matches.
