Miss Bertie Makes Stuff: The Winter of Good Intentions: The one where Miss Bertie and the Little Worcester House part company.

This is the penultimate post on good intentions as I'm almost fully up to date, and fully intend (ah ha ha) to work and produce rather than intend and catch up. So far, I'm up to October/November of 2011 and so many things change here....

So this is the month where the LWH and I part company. I loved my little house because it was my space; it was quirky with winding stairs and hidden cupboards, a wood burning stove in the front room, it had a beautiful little garden, and a fantastic view of the cathedral from my workroom, and the spires and rooftops from the top bedroom.
I loved it dearly for all of these things, but it also had lethal stairs; what seemed to be a fridge-like micro climate interior; horribly depressing black, ex-office cord carpet all through the house from top to bottom including a 'patched' area which had clearly gone round a open plan column, no insulation, draughty windows, damp, an odd layout making the ground floor like a big corridor, and only one usable room during the coldest months. I regularly went to bed wearing a hat, hoody, thermal underwear, as well my pyjamas, and regular guests brought extra layers just to have a cup of tea in the front room. The LWH needs care and attention to make it completely beautiful and lovely which my landlord was not willing to spend, and I was resenting paying for my love hate tenancy. So I moved.

I knew that it was going to take a while to pack up everything. I'm a 'one size fits all' kind of girl in that my belongings expand to fit. Also, I swear I must have been a squirrel in a past life; anyone who knows me is amazed/appalled by how well I can pack things away. It's the unpacking and moving that is troublesome, so I started packing and streamlining about 6 weeks before I knew I had to leave. Bearing in mind that at this point I didn't actually have anywhere to move to, this is quite advanced planning for me. However, I still had a massive amount of stuff, I wasn't fully packed on the day of moving, transport didn't work out as expected, and it all took an exhausting amount of effort. All pretty usual.

Before everything was packed I tidied the house to look beautiful and took photographs of every room. I had loved living in the LWH and the idea of simply leaving with no record of somewhere so important seemed sad. In an interview Michael Winner said that people don't take pictures of things that really matter, such as houses and rooms, but leave it to memory which often fails them later on. So here are some glimpses of the LWH.

The time capsule parlour