We bought a house! Years of saving, moving away from London because we couldn’t ever afford to buy a house there, and a slow but steady erosion of ideals have culminated in the purchase of a tiny little Victorian terraced house in Colchester.

The house we’ve bought is a 2—3 bed mid-terrace. There’s no front garden and there’s no hallway, you go from pavement to front door to living room. It’s a small house, with all the main rooms measuring 3.3×3.3m. That’s quite small. Especially when we’ve lived in a house where a 4-seater sofa didn’t look out of place. After the living room there’s a gap, you couldn’t call it a hallway, which leads up to the stairs. Then the dining room, with a door out to the back garden and a big understairs cupboard. The kitchen is tiny, with not much space for food, pans or cooking. There’s a back lobby, which I’ve discovered is very common in this part of the country, and it’s currently used for the fridge-freezer on one side and the washer on the other. The bathroom is the last room you come to on this floor.

The stairs cut horizontally across the house, so at the top of the stairs you turn left for the main bedroom, which has two windows, a cast-iron fireplace and a built-in cupboard. To the right there’s a second bedroom, with a window over the garden and a door into the tiny third bedroom. This would be great as a nursery, but it’s not private, since it’s only accessible from this room.

Outside the garden is entirely enclosed by fencing. There’s a large shed and a gate out to the back pathway that cuts along the back of all the gardens along the terrace. The garden is currently covered in several inches of coarse gravel making it really awkward to walk on. You sink as you crunch.

And that’s how it is as we move in.