Not a dry eye for the house

Some of you may recall that I tend to write about personal matters in my Endpiece columns. And things are not going to be any different this time around. Not long ago, I moved from an apartment block in Warsaw’s Bemowo district (which, in spite of everything, I remember fondly and still miss) to somewhere with a bit more space. Since then, it has transpired that my brother and his family are soon going to swap their Warsaw apartment for a semi-detached house a few miles further out. Other friends have just moved out to terraced housing in the suburbs of Warsaw, Lublin and Poznań, while others are looking for something similar or even for plots on which to build their own homes. The parents of a friend of mine, when they retired, exchanged their cramped flat in a block for a house by a lake so that they could – as they told us – spend their old age closer to nature and have somewhere for “the grandchildren to run around in.” The dad of another friend also decided to change his active Warsaw life for a pastoral idyll in the Masurian lake district. And so, the wheels of business keep on turning, but the supply simply cannot keep up with demand. Cities are sprawling and terraced, semi-detached and detached housing is now being ever more tightly packed into the suburbs. Some developers have given up on building apartment blocks in favour of detached houses, while those that have long specialised in this segment are now launching even more projects of this type. As working from home remains in vogue and while improvements continue to be made in terms of roads and access to services outside cities, the decision to move to more peaceful surroundings with cleaner air and more space has become easier to make.

The opposite trend can only be seen when it comes to students and graduates as they move to large cities to start their independent lives. They prefer city centres, noise and excitement with convenient night-time transport for returning to their rented apartments. Their family homes will forever remain places to visit at weekends or for family get-togethers at Christmas. I, too, was holding out hope for such a scenario, but a few days ago my parents told us that they were planning to sell their country home and move to an apartment in the city. Their reasons for making such a change were both rational and understandable, so there was little point in talking them out of it. After all, no one in their old age wants to worry about heating and cleaning a large and mostly empty house or spending all their time looking after a large garden. At a certain age, stairs become a problem, as does travelling to the local shops, to the doctor, to see friends or to the chemist. The opportunities for going out on the town for dinner become more attractive. The rest of the family, including myself, somehow never even considered that our former home could one day belong to someone else – but now a buyer is waiting impatiently for my parents to move out as they look around for somewhere new to live, which I must admit that they are very much enjoying. They are now keenly looking forward to this new life and I’m happy for them, even though I’ve secretly shed more than a tear for the wooden house in which I took my first steps and built a town out of toy bricks with my brother. This was the place I lived in when I went out on my first date, and the place where I absorbed the advice that I’ve remembered for the rest of my life. It is also the home that has seen the coming of yet another generation, where my eldest daughter spoke her first words and took her first summer swim in the garden pool.

So what’s next in store for us? We already know that the whole family (and there are quite a few of us) will be booking hotel rooms for Christmas, both near and far afield. I also believe that my parents’ new home will be a base for visiting the world – or at least the rest of Poland, which is something that for various reasons Mum and Dad have been unable to do so far. It’s also time for Mum, after her many years of looking after us, to take a break from her role as housekeeper. Previously, I never paid much attention to this, but it seems that hotels have quite good deals for guests who want to spend Easter and Christmas in comfort without being chained to the kitchen. Of course, I shall be inviting my parents over to our place for such celebrations – and so my first investment in a large dining table has already been made.