In all the hubbub of our first few months in Brighton, I never took the time to share our new home. I was planning to finally post some collages of our lovingly decorated home in the space between our wedding and the arrival of my UK visa. Little did I know how packed that space of time would become. Before I dive in to the latest chapter in the saga of our first year in Britain, let me show you the place we've loved calling home since last September.
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| You already saw glimpses of it in our wedding photos, but here is the street we've called home. |
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| And the views to the sea from our front door. |
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| Now, take a step inside. Welcome to the world's most glorious living room, just to your left as you walk in the front door. Notice how the ten-seater dining table is dwarfed under these ceilings. For the first time in our adult lives, last November's Thanksgiving, with 18 guests, didn't feel overcrowded. (Well, okay, maybe just a little.) But just check out all those shelves. So much storage space, we hardly knew what to do with it! (But we figured out fast.) |
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| Wander down our delightful front hallway, whose walls are not quite parallel, and an image of the very modest bathroom (top right). |
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| Off the front hallway, here's the master bedroom, with its high ceilings that never ceased to impress me. I love how the light from the Turkish lamp on my bedside dances up its walls. |
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| Turn down the back hallway, past the bathroom and hallway closet, to reach the guest room and, finally, the kitchen. |
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We (okay, I) designed the Alice in Wonderland themed guest room/office in homage to the tunnel that may have inspired Alice's rabbit hole, right in our private gardens. The construction of the horizontal Murphy bed-desk, on the other hand, was a two-person effort and a real labor of love at that.
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| And at last, welcome to the deliciously retro-style kitchen, which opens to yet a third hallway/bike storage area. We had to buy a special tray to shuttle our dinners back and forth from this kitchen all the way to our living room. |
Lucky you!, you might say. Oh, lucky indeed.
As you may remember, we had to plan our wedding in just 3 months' time since I lost my job and thus my right to live (with Nicolas) in the UK. We only moved to the UK last September when I landed a consulting gig, but after just 9 days on the job, the company let me go— they've since fired almost 50% of their staff, but it's rough to move to a new country for only 9 days of work!! Especially considering I'd left a stable job in Denmark, and my firing meant not only no salary, but no visa to live in the same country as my partner. (Hence the wedding bells.)
As luck would have it, I got a new job the week before our wedding— right near Brighton! Yay! After flying all over Europe and the US for job interviews, we were so happy to get the good news that we'd be staying in this town we love. I've signed the contract, but I need my spouse visa before I can begin working. To that end, the week after the wedding, we filled out a several hundred page application with all sorts of weirdly invasive questions about our relationship. No sooner had we finished filling out and assembling all the application (and paying immigration lawyers!), but we got a
notice of eviction— for no reason!! The landlord has decided to repossess the property, likely so he can sell. That's right, the lovely home I just paraded before you, it's gone, now all in piles scattered across a new flat with overwhelmingly blank walls.
We faced the seemingly insurmountable task of finding a new home without having any written proof of my right to live in the UK, nor any payslips from 2017. (Nicolas's earnings are all in cash.) Who would ever rent to us?? Luckily, our realtors agreed to vouch for us if we stuck with them, but they only had a single flat available that was in our budget and would accept our cats— and this flat was uglier and more expensive than our actual home. Our realtors were also able to offer us (with only light begging) a bigger flat, if we "had an interested friend."
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| Along the waterfront, a few blocks closer to town center, this flat was tucked away behind a teensy private garden. With full sea views and ceilings, believe it or not, even higher than our previous flat, it has incredible potential. Plus, the two separate hallways leading to double bedrooms each with their own en suite make the ideal layout for flatshare among more mature renters who appreciate their own space. |
A very hectic 24 hours ensued, but we found a nice person online who was also in a pinch, and was willing to pretend to be our long-time friend looking to move in with us. (This new place is pretty fabulous, actually, if you get past the idea of moving into a flatshare during the first month of marriage.)
We're now in the process of disassembling out lives and rebuilding them a few blocks away. It seems like if it's not one thing, it's another. And since 2017 seems to be going this way for us, we got another surprise: our electricity and gas company, who we contacted to close up our account, discovered that they completely forgot to charge us the electricity-half of our electricity-and-gas bills for the past year, so now we've got an extra year of electricity bills thrown at us! It seems we really can't get a break.
There is still a slight chance that I won't be able to get my passport back from the UK Home Office (the people processing my UK spouse visa application), so I may end up missing my own wedding, and skyping it in... but Nicolas will be there for sure. It will actually be the first time he even meets my extended family. I'm hoping I get to introduce him in person!
Happy one month anniversary to us.
