People keep asking for photos. “Let’s see the new place!” they say, like we’ve moved into a Pinterest board with reclaimed wood and solar fairy lights. I never know how to reply. Should I show them the outside wall where the plaster gave up mid-job and you can still see the handprints of whoever ran out of cement first? Or the garden tap that doesn’t actually connect to any pipe?

Fine. Here’s the tour. No filters. No apologies.

You walk in through the front door—unless it’s swollen shut again, in which case you climb through the side window like a raccoon. That window doesn’t open properly, but it’s large enough if you exhale first. Once inside, the first thing you notice is the smell. A mix of earth, hope, and something damp we still haven’t traced.

To your left is what we call the living room. It contains:

• One armchair with a missing leg, balanced on an upturned bucket
• A pile of tiles we might use in the kitchen
• Three species of spider, two of which seem to be at war

To the right is the kitchen. Currently home to:

• A gas camping stove
• A fridge that runs on solar but only when the sun feels like cooperating
• Half a sink, and a cutting board that might be older than Jamie

Above that, the roof. Let’s talk about the roof.

There’s a patch above the kitchen where it bows a little, like it’s trying to listen in. We’ve propped it up with an old beam we found under the stairs. Is it safe? Probably. We haven’t been crushed yet.

Back to the hallway—narrow, damp, full of echoes. At the end is the bathroom. Or, technically, the “future bathroom,” currently housing:

• One bag of cement
• Two broken tiles
• An old chair that’s too haunted-looking to move

The toilet is outside. It’s a compost toilet now. That wasn’t intentional—it just broke and we got creative. Jamie calls it The Throne of Shame. Sam, more optimistically, refers to it as “Phase One of Sustainable Sanitation.”

The bedroom? Mattress on the floor, three bookshelves made from crates, one lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, and a window with no glass that we cover with a bit of tarp when it rains. It still rains inside.

We did install solar, though. Or—Jamie did. With help from YouTube, some old cables, and his growing obsession with off-grid living. It powers the basics: fridge (sometimes), a few lights, his laptop. He’s now researching ways to expand it without breaking the budget or frying himself. If you’re curious about how solar setups work in practice—not just the shiny brochure stuff—this breakdown from SolarPower Europe is pretty solid:

https://www.solarpowereurope.org/insights/solar-power-statistics

The outside? Olive trees. A fig tree that hasn’t quite died. Chickens next door that have adopted us. And piles of rubble that we call “material storage” so it sounds intentional.

It’s not pretty. But weirdly, we love it.

Every squeaky hinge, every hole in the floor, every botched attempt to fix something ourselves—it’s all ours. This house was abandoned for years. Now it breathes again. It leaks. It groans. But it lives.

Give us a few more months. Maybe a bathroom door. A working tap. A light that doesn’t flicker like a haunted submarine.

Or don’t. This is home. However broken, however unfinished, however chaotic.

This is where we start again.