Where's Home?

With the trip back to London to pick up all of my stuff looming this is a question I have been asking myself a lot, particularly as squeezing myself back into my childhood bedroom is not going amazingly well. The hope is it will all get a little bit easier to manage when I get the storage unit which is not so far away now, but that's dependent on being able to organise that well enough to contain all of my books, clothes, the small amount of furniture I'm keeping and everything out of my kitchen, including Morgan, my coffee machine. There's not a whole lot of stuff to move across from the house to the unit, but that's partly because there is not a whole lot of space in this room and I would really like to get to a place where keeping things on the floor is the only option because it is the literal only place that has any space. Part of it is because I have used this place for storage for a while and part of it is because I have a hell of a lot of stuff. 

I would love to be in a place where I could put my gin themed tea set to good use or have the space for my sewing patterns to all be on a shelf above a decent-sized cutting table with my machine on and drawers underneath it for all my sewing odds and ends and knitting junk. I would love to have my shoes laid out where I can see them all, but the time for these things is not right now and it might not even be in my next place. To be honest, the main things about my "first" flat will be having a decent amount of space for bookshelves so I can house the books, enough wardrobe space and a kitchen with work surfaces so that I can have Morgan the Coffee Maker sitting on the side and still bake cakes, cool them and ice them without getting panicky that I'm running out of space to put things and space to breathe because that's what happens currently. It got marginally better when my microwave packed in and I got that to the type, then didn't replace it, but honestly, that kitchen was not designed for someone like me to live there. 

The unfortunate byproduct of all of this is I feel like I'm losing the home that I love, London, for a place that I don't feel like is home really, in Manchester. Even for a limited time, it makes me feel restless and it makes me feel pretty stressed out sometimes. My parents have finally managed to start redecorating the house and considered making my room one of the next on the list before we realised that we weren't going to agree on a colour, and I'm a stroppy whatsit - it might be their house, but this is my space, so I have to like the colour. The greys that I like are far too dark and if any part of this room looks beige or magnolia, it will make me feel no end of stress. My mum wants me to clear up my room and "find a home for" a whole pile of things, but it's impossible to find a home for things when the only places that they can go to are full of other stuff, and mostly, I'm limited with what I can do about that. 

Thankfully, my dad took me back to London pretty early on in lockdown and I managed to bring back my weighted blanket, some of my clothes that I couldn't do without, my favourite pair of shoes more recently (glossy patent and bright yellow heels, because I am that ridiculous) and those things have helped me kind of keep in together, feel like myself and still feel a bit more at home, but even they are not a magic wand that will make me be completely settled, but the good thing is I'm keeping an eye on what the property market is doing and what is going on at work, etc, so as soon as I can get back to London, I'll be back, I'll be settled and I might even be able to invite people over to the new flat. Once I've painted the walls greatly inappropriate shades of mustard, grey and dark coral, of course. And also, maybe, a violent red, but I've not really decided where I want that to go yet. Granted, my mum and I might clash about interior design a few times before then, given that when I told her about my idea of a blood-red feature wall, navy to royal blue sofa and a bright yellow wing back armchair with everything else in the room being neutral she looked like she wanted to throw up in her own mouth... At least I have the time to figure it out though.