Every house and home is different and individual, as people are. Houses are never ‘the same’. Houses may have many fundamental things in common, roofs and walls and windows, just as people have heads and fingers and toes. Houses may look similar from the outside, may even be designed and built to the same plan. But even during and just after construction, there will be thousands of minor ways in which one house is different from one which looks identical. Then as people come to inhabit a house it becomes different in hundreds and then thousands and hundreds of thousands of ways from every other house. It is as unique as a human being and bears all the marks and scars and signs of joy and happiness and growth and development as each individual person.
The colour and shape of the curtains. If there are curtains at all. The colours of walls and carpets and floors. The arrangement of the furniture. The way things are stored, scattered, left lying about, or kept tidy. Photographs of family members, living or deceased. Original artwork by artists or children. Musical instruments. Food bowls for pets. Cluttered areas of paperwork needing to be put away. Dust on shelves. Uneven floor boards or stone steps which have been worn down over decades by feet. Bicycles left outside. It is hard to take in all the details; our brain picks up on generalities and discards the details which undermine these. We are also influenced by our knowledge of the people who live in each house; whether they are friends or acquaintances or people we hardly know; the contents of each house back up these perceptions.
Even if two houses are side by side, their views to the outside world may be so completely different, they could be in different towns; the angle of trees or adjoining buildings completely changes the light which comes in through windows and the mood of the interior.
And as houses get older, so the differences increase. So the angle of floors changes, windows are replace, floors are scuffed, brickwork fades to different colours.
Houses are like people, to be celebrated in all their myriad uniqueness.
