Thank you House !

I will always remember the day Gérald told me he had seen a nice house for sale not far from the apartment we lived in, in Schaerbeek.

He visited it first and then we went back with the girls and immediately we pictured ourselves in it. Although it was a wreck, everything had to be refurbished but that didn't scare us.

As if like a miracle, we already felt at home there...

The house was at that time divided into three apartments and the whole thing was terrible, bordering on unsanitary.

The garden, quite large for Brussels, was invaded by brambles and ivy.

But any of this didn't scare us, we fell in love and immediately made an offer, put our apartment up for sale and three months later, the apartment was sold, the house bought and we moved straight in.

The tenants on the lower floors left after 6 months.

But, the top floor being free of occupation, we moved there.

I remember this period with tenderness...

I remember extraordinary moments...

We were on top of each other, living in 60 m2, I cooked using a stove placed in the corridor, our double bed was the exact size of the width of the room and the girls (Marie and Juliette only at the time) slept on bunk beds in a tiny room adjoining ours…

Our living room/dining room was in what later became Marie's room, a large room of 25m2 with a balcony, overlooking the street in front of us, which, at the time, was lined with Japanese cherry trees. (Magnificent).

We were on top of each other but, on the other hand, we had a bathroom worthy of a real mansion 😉 Gérald had made a point of having one of the bathrooms already finished before moving in and it was his friend Luc who took care of it.

So, we had a superb bathroom with paneled walls and bathtub, shower and toilet 😊, super chic!

We did not yet have central heating, so we kept warm with small electric radiators. I remember having the central heating on on Christmas Day! Ahmed called us that day (we were at my grandmother's in Kraainem) to tell us the good news! A perfect Christmas gift!

But, above all, I remember happy days, weekends spent together telling stories and talking through the walls...

This period lasted a few months but it was a few months that I will always remember with happiness…

Then, everything came together, the tenants finally left and we were able to begin all the necessary work on the whole house.

Within a year, the electricity, the roof, the heating, the frames, the floors, the paint, the garden and all the rest 😉 was finished.

Of course, we did a lot by ourselves. I can still see Gérald and I sanding the floors with a huge machine, so big that it felt like a centrifuge on me and I found myself propelled to the other end of the room… what a lot of laughs we had!

I will also always remember the garden, which has always remained a source of pleasure for Gérald as for me... We redesigned it from A to Z, finding species of plants that would flower throughout spring and summer, of course with a few errors 😅 like the bamboos that I have decided to plant because they don’t lose their leaves in winter and stay green, but without thinking that they would invade the entire garden just like that!

Then, the years rolled by and life settled down.…

Marie was 9 and Juliette 6 years old when we moved in.

Today, Marie is 25 years old, Juliette 22 and Joséphine joined us 13 years ago.

We can imagine everything we experienced in this house, can’t we?

Joy of birth, sadness of death, in fact the cycle of life…

I believe that the period of time we had the house corresponds to a life cycle and that cycle has ended now and therefore it was the right time to sell it.

But of course there are things that I will never forget, like the many birthdays we celebrated there, our Halloween traditions for which we all met at our place to have our makeup done by Christine or Véronique before going around the neighborhood « tricks or treating » and then eating Véronique or Vinciane’s good pumpkin soup…

I won’t forget either the many "olive oil tastings" organized by Brigitte and Bertrand, we met then a lot of new people with whom we exchanged lots of things and tons of projects!

I won’t forget either the Christmas trees that Gérald went to pick up with the girls and which were bigger and bigger every year. We then decorated the tree with my grandma who was so happy to spend some time with her great-granddaughters. Lots of tenderness here…

Grandma would stay by the fire before sinking into the Togo sofa for her nap (during which nothing could happen to her!)... feeling of security...

I won’t forget either the sound of my mom's voice who, upon arriving at our house, shouted from all the way up through the stairwell "Kaaariiiin" with her loudest voice, this sound still resonates in my head. It has since become a sound for me that I try to find again when I close my eyes and think of my mom, because when I succeed in finding again this sound, she is right in front of me with a beautiful smile on her face… magical.

I can also still hear the voices of the girls' friends who came to have lunch at our house because we lived 2 minutes away from the school "Saint Dominique", I can still hear their debates about life and I can still feel their incredible strength as teenagers! These were magical moments that kept me young because I was in constant contact with their youth and their carelessness!

Thank you Luz, Louise, Alba, Aude, Marine and all the others! Thank you girls!

This house contains also the girls' first boyfriends, the first love stories, the first happiness, the first heartaches, the first betrayals... I will never forget Charles, Mehdi, Igor...

But this house is also our home of Gérald and me, the nest of our happiness, our haven of peace, our pride in decoration, our own fortress.

It's also a neighborhood life with extraordinary people, a neighborhood life that makes you never feel alone, thank you Thérèse, Jean and his wife, Marina and her husband, Madame Lardinois, Florence and Laurent, Ernesto and Véronique, Christophe and Esmeralda and Pascale and Benoît, our friends for life! Leaving you all makes me really sad!

The house must now experience a new adventure and that is why we must pass the baton to others so that a new story can be created, again and again!

We take with us our fortress, our happiness and our memories.

Everything stays in our heart.

Thank you « House » for this extraordinary piece of life that we experienced maybe a little thanks to you!