21 sleeps

When does a house become a home? Is it when you have spent an entire night ripping up the carpet you want to replace with floorboards. Is it when you design your new kitchen and oversee the upgrade. Or is it when you select the new tiles for the bathroom and decide on what colour bench top and how big you want your shower? Is it when your father invests his entire holiday in sorting out the backyard and installing those fantastic little mist spray thingies that make summer tolerable and keep the flies away?

Perhaps the question should be, when does your home become just a house again? When the love that thrived there so wonderfully begins to die? When the spare room becomes the place you spend most nights?

When you no longer talk about it as somewhere to grow old together but how much money your share of it will give you?

At the end of the day, it's just bricks and mortar. Home is where your heart is, no matter how bruised your heart is.

7 years ago we bought this house together, made it a home and now it's 'sold' and is simply a house again.

It's perfect location, great size, fantastic neighbours and general perfection no longer matters. It's dollars in the bank.

But for what it's worth, it's number 11 will miss for me.