Everything is figureoutable 💌

Notes on building a home.

I moved to Barcelona last year after an 18 month stint of living out of a suitcase, moving around Latin America and gobbling up the most incredible experience of my life.

There was endless, life-affirming adventure: planes, trains and desert buggies, volcanoes, temples, connections, culture, wonder, adrenalin highs and spiritual depths. But all the while I was also searching for a new place to land, having finally acknowledged that I was never meant to stay in the UK, despite the lovely life I’d worked very hard to build there.

So when I did finally land here in Barcelona, I was beyond excited to unpack and finally create a base for myself once more. Despite the predilection for adventure I love building a home - although this materialised quite literally when I ended up taking an unfurnished rental, which in Barcelona means EMPTY. No washing machine, no fridge, nothing. I did randomly get a ladder and a can of bug spray, though.

I saw it as an opportunity to curate something that was really mine after so long moving through hotels, Airbnbs and the occasional generous friend’s spare room. I was riding high after finding not only my city but my place within the city, having tackled its notoriously ferocious rental market with my limited Spanish. I emerged not only unscathed but incredibly fortunate with what I’d managed to secure.

But the reality set in when I picked up the keys and went back to the apartment for the first time since viewing it for all of four minutes, and stood in the full scale of the task ahead. Then, having traversed the globe, having found a way to secure a visa against all the post-Brexit odds, having survived break-ups, having dived headfirst into grief and having carved a whole new life and a whole new type of life, independently as a woman in my mid-30s… it was finding out that the toilet didn’t flush that tipped me from jubilant, independent and all-conquering to completely, despairingly overwhelmed in one fell swoop. 

It was a Sunday. Everything was closed, including my rental agency. I had neither the language to express the issue, nor the knowledge of who to express said issue to. I had no friends or family to discuss said issue with and, more urgently, I now also had no toilet in my own home. I challenge even the most minimalistic of folks to dismiss this particular amenity.

I lay down on the echoey floor of my empty apartment, with nothing but a hand luggage backpack and a single plant for company, my new keys still in my hand and my mind whirring, wondering what I’d done, what the hell I was going to do, where I was going to begin… and where on earth I was going to find a toilet.