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When we bought it, the roof was gone over the kitchen and there was a tree growing out of the chimney. The estate agent described this as characterful. We paid for it anyway, on a Tuesday, in the rain, and then sat in the car for a while not saying anything.
Seven years later it has a roof, a kitchen, a bathroom that works, and a front door that we hung twice because the first time we hung it upside down and did not notice until the following morning.
The picture shows both states at once, which is the only honest way to show it. The left half is the ruin, with the tree in the chimney and the sky through the rafters. The right half is now, with the light on and the door the right way up.
The truck carries the whole thing, and on the flatbed there is a pile of what it took. The cement mixer we bought second hand and sold again for the same price. The seventeen buckets. The camping stove we cooked on for two winters. The bath that stood in the garden for a year before it went in, which the neighbours got used to.
The number plate is the day we got the keys. There is a second small plate on the wheelbarrow with the day the roof went on, because that was the day it stopped being a ruin.
The tree from the chimney is on the picture too. We planted it in the garden and it is still alive, which is more than it deserved.
There is a jar on the windowsill with the first nail we pulled out of the front wall, and there is a very small drawing of the house done by our daughter when she was five, in which the house has a smiling face and, accurately, no roof.
We hung the picture in the hallway, opposite the door, so it is the first thing anybody sees.
Everyone who visits stands in front of it for a long time and then says the same sentence, which is that they cannot believe it is the same house.