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The boy moved out this week, raising that most heartfelt of parental questions: how quickly can we repurpose his room?
It’s not that we are happy about him leaving, you understand, but we have piles of clutter large enough to embarrass even Birmingham council, and he has some major cupboard space in his den. The landing outside the loft room looks like charity shops have been coming to drop off their unwanted goods, and my wife has been secreting bags full of immensely binnable old paperwork into the box room I grandiosely refer to as my office. I tell you, if he hadn’t left soon, we’d have had to do some serious tidying. He’s quite engaging and chatty, so we will miss his presence, even as we celebrate the emancipation of several cubic feet of storage space.
My wife is understandably conflicted about this major family event. It’s clearly time for him to go but, of course, the thought that this is the last time he will live under our roof is a wrench. Nonetheless, it is a big moment. The first real potential for extra space since we moved in more than 20 years ago. I think of this less as an empty nest than a serious upsizing without the construction work.
The boy himself has complicated matters by insisting that he will probably stay over at least once a week, when he comes around for dinner or sees friends nearby. He does not feel the breach sufficiently clear cut to warrant turning his room into an outpost of the Big Yellow storage company and has made clear that he expects his den to remain in its current state as an unlovely shrine to himself.
Since he will be only a 25-minute train ride away and is quite family conscious, there is a reasonable chance of him making good on his threats to stay over on a weekly basis, at least in the early days. So the reoccupation of his room will probably have to begin as a stealth exercise. His mother will not wish to see moves that accelerate the final breach, so swapping the bed out for a futon is probably unachievable, in the near term.
Regardless of how we solve this, we are now halfway towards having to cope with an empty nest. The girl is also threatening to be out within a year, once she finishes at college.
I’ve never really understood those parents who can’t wait to be shot of their children, but I’m certain that part of our empty-nest angst springs from the lack of interesting options for the extra space. This leaves us focusing on what we’ve lost rather than the sudden acquisition of up to two decent-sized rooms. We need one of those property-porn TV shows with Kirstie Allsopp offering people advice on the cool things they could do now. It is probably a bit late to be thinking about a gym but a library or a home cinema could do the trick. Why gaze mournfully at the deserted space your child has left behind when you could be immersing yourself in a 10ft screen with Dolby Atmos speakers and Cinematech Valentino seating.
Walk-in closets? No, the rooms are probably too large and, anyway, I’d worry about moths. Obviously, we did consider a Fifty Shades of Grey-style sex dungeon, but the windows are quite large, and red just doesn’t fit with the upstairs colour scheme. I could indulge a new hobby recreating famous historical battle scenes — Waterloo, Salamanca, the January 6 storming of the US Capitol — though I’m not sure that’s less embarrassing than the sex dungeon. I’m quite taken with the idea of an indoor greenhouse, but then we’d have to hire an indoor gardener, what with my being the Harold Shipman of house plants. And aphids can really depress a property price.
Logic dictates we ought to think about downsizing, or taking a lodger, though I recoil from this last option. It was bad enough putting up with the music blaring from the bathroom during the spawns’ 45-minute showers, and we do actually love them. As for moving to a smaller place, that just feels like a tacit admission that you have begun the long march to decrepitude. And besides, spare rooms feel like a preparation for grandchildren.
This, then, is the answer to how you cope. It’s not so much waving goodbye as saying hello to a raft of exciting interior decoration projects. It’s not an empty nest, it is suddenly a house with untapped potential. Or at least a less visible option for the bags of clutter.
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