Doorknobs and letterboxes

It’s no secret that I des­per­ately want to get onto the first rung of the hous­ing lad­der. It’s even less of a secret that in the cur­rent hous­ing mar­ket — being on my own, and although I earn more than the aver­age wage — I don’t stand a hope in hell of get­ting enough of a mort­gage to be able to afford to buy anywhere.

In all the many art­icles I’ve read about the prob­lems faced by first-time buy­ers, and when I’ve talked to people in the same situ­ation, one theme keeps occur­ring. It’s that slight obses­sion with own­ing your own prop­erty. Stor­ies about hous­ing are all over the news; every­one you meet seems to be buy­ing some­where; the pro­spect of sav­ing up for a deposit appears more and more dis­tant as the required fin­an­cial threshold keeps increas­ing; you real­ise you’re get­ting older and that you’re still rent­ing; you’re at that age where prop­erty is one of the main top­ics of con­ver­sa­tion at social gath­er­ings; and, of course, every­where you look there seem to be For Sale signs advert­ising places that you fondly ima­gine could be your ideal home.

If you’re not in this situ­ation, then believe me — it really can get this obsess­ive. Own­ing your own place implies gain­ing real inde­pend­ence, hav­ing your per­sonal space to do with exactly as you wish. Added to that is the (pos­sibly unhealthy) Brit­ish desire — often drummed into you from the moment you become a teen­ager — that one day you will be the proud owner of your own four walls and a roof. An Englishman’s home is his castle, to quote a ridicu­lous old saying.

These things depress me, though. So I try not to think about them too much. Some­times, I even succeed.

Instead, what I have begun to notice is that when it comes to think­ing dream­ily of hav­ing my own place — or rather, hav­ing my own mort­gage — I obsess over smal­ler aspects of the big­ger pic­ture. In the last couple of years I have, at vari­ous times, wanted my own garden more than any­thing. Why? Because I would be able to relax some­where else other than the local park on sunny days, and because I could finally have a cat. I’ve sat in my flat get­ting frus­trated that I don’t have just one extra room to afford me a little more space. I’ve wanted a kit­chen that is lar­ger than my cur­rent tiny gang­way, so that I could cook three-course meals and have — gasp! — crazy things like a din­ing table. I’ve looked at my walls and thought that while the cream-coloured emul­sion that has become a stand­ard fea­ture of all ren­ted prop­er­ties is fine in prin­ciple, it doesn’t cater for my des­per­ate urge to paint walls red. Or the fact that I want a blue bathroom.

These obses­sions are undoubtedly silly little things, but in a sense they’re use­ful pre­cisely because of their ridicu­lous nature. I can cope with think­ing about them, because they’re vastly prefer­able to think­ing about the big­ger issue of how I’m ever going to be able to afford my own place without either win­ning the lot­tery or rob­bing a bank.

So I guess you want to know about my latest mini-obsession, don’t you? Well, it’s simple. I want my own front door.

I live in one of those everso famil­iar Vic­torian ter­raced houses that have been split into flats, so I have two front doors. The main front door to the house is where my door­bell is loc­ated. It’s where all the flats in the house receive their post. And it’s where cour­i­ers inform me that they have to leave the heavy items they have just delivered, because they’re not insured to carry them up the stairs. I have to leave my flat to answer the front door too, which just seems wrong somehow.

The second front door is rather less pre­pos­sess­ing. It’s set in the corner of the stair­well, made of cheap and rather hollow-sounding wood, and could do with a lick of paint. It has no other pur­pose than to let me in and out of my flat. Nobody comes to this front door unless I have led them there from the ‘other’ front door.

My greatest annoy­ance about the com­munal front door is the huge amount of post that gets shoved through the let­ter­box, end­ing up scattered all over the entrance hall. When I pick up the mail, I am usu­ally pre­pared for the fact that very little of it will be for me, or even for any­one else who lives in the build­ing. Instead, it will be for the suc­ces­sion of people who have pre­vi­ously ren­ted flats here. At a rough estim­a­tion, that fig­ure cur­rently runs to some ten dif­fer­ent names. The post gradu­ally stacks up in messy piles, until it even­tu­ally gets removed by one or other of the address­ees, many of whom still appear to have a door-key. Indeed, the fact that these people come and go through my front door — or, at least, my shared front door — feels like an inva­sion of pri­vacy. Yes, I really am that petty.

That’s what I want, then. A front door that exclus­ively belongs to me. When the door­bell rings, I want it to be sum­mon­ing me and me only. The only let­ters to be dropped through the let­ter­box will have my name on them. When people turn up at the door, they’ll be set­ting foot inside my home, rather than a com­munal hall from where they have to be shown to door num­ber two. I might even have a wel­come mat, say­ing ‘WELCOME’ or more likely ‘NOT TODAY, THANK YOU’. The door­bell will have a subtle chime; it won’t play God Save the Queen or The Yel­low Rose of Texas. Oh, and the door will be equipped with a spy­hole and strong locks. Everything, in fact, that a proper front door should have.

This week, I am obsess­ing over hav­ing my very own front door. Next week, I may decide that I want a bird-table. Or a patio.