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Books > Health, Home & Family > Home & house maintenance > General
Moving house has never flustered author Jane Christmas. She loves
houses: viewing them, negotiating their price, dreaming up interior
plans, hiring tradespeople to do the work and overseeing
renovations. She loves houses so much that she's moved thirty-two
times. There are good reasons for her latest house move, but after
viewing sixty homes, Jane and her husband succumb to the emotional
fatigue of an overheated English housing market and buy a wreck in
the town of Bristol that is overpriced, will require more money to
renovate than they have and that neither of them particularly like.
As Jane's nightmare renovation begins, her mind returns to the
Canadian homes where she grew up with parents who moved and
renovated constantly around the Toronto area. Suddenly, the
protective seal is blown off Jane's memory of a strict and
peripatetic childhood and its ancillary damage-lost friends,
divorces, suicide attempts-and the past threatens to shake the
foundations of her marriage. This latest renovation dredges a
deeper current of memory, causing Jane to question whether in
renovating a house she is in fact attempting to renovate her past.
With humour and irreverence, Open House reveals that what we think
we gain by constantly moving house actually obscures the precious
and vital parts of our lives that we leave behind. This is a memoir
that will appeal to anyone whose pulse quickens at the mere mention
of real estate.
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