House-hunting again

Went all the way to N22 to view this house. Just the brown bit. The white part belongs to two flats. It was the width of the average public convenience, the whole footprint being 24ft x 12ft, and had a peculiar clutch of small, dark, uninhabitable rooms on the other side of that black door, which were the tail end of a very large workshop/outbuilding belonging to somebody else and not only that, the other person's vast chunk of it, 50 feet or so, the inner wall of which ran right along the garden, had windows in it. And a door. An intriguing red door into, what? One of the windows that overlooked the garden had bottles of bleach or washing-up liquid on the windowsill, so was obviously a kitchen or a washroom of some sort. It all felt a bit weird. You could be sitting in your deckchair and anyone could be perving at you between the bleach bottle and the scrubbing brush. Urrrgh. It gives me the cold shivers.

Houses with flat roofs are a no-no for me, anyway. Not only do they require expensive maintenance (I have forked out six and a half grand in the past to repair bloody flat roofs), but the rooms directly beneath them, usually bedrooms, get roasting hot in summer (ha! Did I say a rude word?) and have to be painted with an anti-reflective coating, which cost me two grand last time I had to do one.

So all in all, it was a four hour journey (two each way) for nothing. Well, not quite nothing. I have explored a new area, the cheaper - and, yes, grottier - part of Bounds Green which, if you know North London, is just north of Wood Green and to the right of Muswell Hill, and found it terrific for transport.

The big problem is, do I buy somewhere now, when I am earning next to nothing with which to pay the bills, or do I stay with Mr Grumpy till the spring and save a bit of extra cash? I vowed I wouldn't spend another freezing winter at Mr G's, where I have to type on a big, open-plan ledge at the top of the stairs with no radiator, and where the north wind whistles through the gaps around the windows and where I am not allowed to have the heating on till the evening, and thus end up typing book reports in fingerless gloves, three fleeces and my hiking boots.

It's now that awful hiatus between autumn and winter. Some morning a few weeks from now, I shall awake in my freezing north facing bedroom with the bullet hole in the window (see entry for 2 July 2007) and find frost riming the grass and my nose. Then I shall think longingly of all the flats and cottages I saw and didn't buy, which had central heating boilers that would have been mine, all mine. 'All I want is a room somewhere...' If only it were that simple. But I have a lifetime's worth of belongings that need a minimum of four rooms plus a large attic. Or an outhouse. Or, damn it, I could leave them in Big Yellow for ever!