We weren’t really looking. We’d been chatting, on and off for years, about selling our four-bedroom family home and buying something smaller and more manageable. The kids had married and had kids of their own, they weren’t coming back, and we were rattling around like a pair of acorns. We’d even called a few real estate agents, looked at a few properties, narrowed down the location, but we’d seen nothing we could imagine ourselves living in.

Jane Caro in the kitchen of her new house.

Then our youngest daughter sent us a link to a house. We had nothing better to do that afternoon, and it was nearby, and, whether we were to be actual buyers or just tyre-kickers, we enjoy looking at houses on open days.

The minute we walked through the door, we knew this was the one. Halfway down a dead-end street on the ridge of a hill, one set of traffic lights from town and a three-bedroom, Federation semi. Truth be told, we like old houses and have never lived in a new one. Inside it was even better. Small but perfectly formed, with the kind of appliances and fixtures that if I’d tried to buy them my husband would have spluttered dramatically before declaring that he wouldn’t........

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