Creativity takes many forms

And sometimes they are rooms

When you’re a creative person, and yes, all humans are inventive and artistic to some degree, but if you’re a sensitive person living in the world with a dire need to channel all of your impressions and emotions through art to find meaning, the compulsion to make something from nothing seems inescapable.

It’s necessary because the longer you live, the more you recognise that this is where you find life force. It might be that your mind needs to find an elegant solution to a complex puzzle. Or very simply, to create something beautiful. This, for reasons beyond your comprehension, is what makes you feel most alive.

Which, is a rather verbose way of saying that I made something, and something very different from what I’ve ever done before. And interestingly, I was unable to commit to writing a new book while I made this thing.

Rooms tell stories: there was once a door behind the mirror.

I know writers will understand when I say that bringing imaginary beings into existence takes every ounce of your psyche. And so, it turns out, does designing and project managing a new bathroom and laundry for your house. There have been so many parallels between stripped back walls and building new ones and my creative process, that I thought I’d tell you about it.

For a start, I completely doubted myself at the beginning. I walked into a designer bathroom store and a friendly man named Robbie with chic tortoiseshell glasses designed my bathroom for me. This is the part of the book writing process when I tell my husband my vague idea and his filmic, mathematical mind instructs me how he would do it. I sit with this and inevitably feel uncomfortable. My subconscious gets strange about having its idea messed with. In the case of the design, my house spoke. It would not allow me to put Robbie’s very nice contemporary bathroom in it. It’s nearly a hundred years old. The house said ‘no’.

When all the tiles and walls were stripped back to bare crumbling brick, I understood. I got tingles. Our bathroom, which is large, used to have a fireplace. It had two doors coming off it. Which leads us to believe that it was once a small living room. Even our builder was surprised and intruiged. It’s so strange and beautiful to imagine that once a family may have sat in that room in the 1930s warming themselves by the fireplace. Perhaps this is why I love to have a long soak in the bath. It feels like a place to linger.

My cat is also a fan of long baths.

I chose this home because its old bones spoke to me. This, like my writing, was personal. It had to be my designs on this bathroom. I went back to Canva and I started with the floor. Bottincino marble tiles. I had loved these tiles from the moment I saw them and yet somehow all the other choices had lead me away from them. I saw that I needed to go back to what had spoken to me. I built the design from the floor up. The process consumed me much like writing. I thought about it whilst driving, walking, cooking. It woke me at night. Instead of character motivations, I agonised over tile placement. And I loved it. I let myself be pulled into Pinterest and Instagram whirlpools. I listened to all the interior design podcasts and learned about bath lengths, mirror heights, scale and proportion, lighting layers and the colour application rule.

And like writing a novel, things went to shit when we least expected it. I’d just said to my husband the actual words: ‘Well, we’re all good. There were no big structural issues.’ The next day our builder pointed out the hole in my daughter’s bedroom wall. The entire wall needed to be sured up. Because it’s such an old house, drilling off the tiles had essentially crumbled the bricks on the other side.

This hole makes itself apparent in any and all manuscript drafts.

I tried to start a new book during the renovation process but found I only had room for words rather than whole stories. I started writing poetry again. It was like watering pot plants rather than a whole lawn. These small missives kept me sane and I loved doing a Varuna poetry course late last year and seeing that after six novels, I am still a beginner in the game of words. I discovered Jane Hirshfield and rediscovered Emily Dickinson. I submitted my work to a poetry journal. I was shortlisted and told my poetry was of ‘exceptional quality’, which has spurred me to keep going.

Houses tell stories and I realised when I saw the brick skeleton of mine why I’d not been able to start a book while renovating (or even post much on Substack or Instagram). I was adding to this home’s story, overlaying other silent and hidden stories with my own. I was in a necessary creation zone.

Now the renovation is done I’m making room for another narrative. This one comes with less tap fixtures and grout, but it’s housed in the same grit and determination and the wild, scary stepping into the void, wondering what secrets and lives might be in the walls.

And I’ll leave you with a few images of the battleground in all its glory:

The laundry used to be a bathroom.

It was ugly, but bless, it had hand-painted Spanish tiles.