A couple of weeks ago, I hopped across to Belgium to visit a friend who lives in Brussels. 

I love travelling by train, and this trip is always a pleasure. Two hours to London, a nice cup of tea in a cafe, then another two hours to Brussels on the Eurostar (we'll ignore for now the enormous queue and the trouble I caused when the security guard didn't know what my pedometer was).

This was a short visit - I arrived at lunchtime and left early the following afternoon. Of course, we went straight for food, to an organic, biodynamic restaurant called something like 'Den Teapot'. My dinner was all the colours of the rainbow. 

I've never been much of a traveller. I've never yearned after foreign lands, and these two short weekends in Belgium are the closest I've ever come to a foreign holiday. 

And so sometimes I forget just how refreshing it can be to be somewhere else for a little while. Brussels feels familiar, but also strange at the same time, and my short trip felt like an entire week away.  

My friend's flat is small, but I love her sense of decoration, and I always come away thinking how lovely it would be to fill my house with plants (forgetting, of course, my inability to keep them alive). Maybe I'll try again in my new house. 

We ended my weekend with a trip to the local bakery, and I'm convinced was the Best Almond Croissant in the Whole World. I've never tasted anything like it. Those ones you get in the supermarket here are nothing in comparison, nothing at all. Heavy, solid, full of so much sweet almond paste - I could have spent all day eating one after another after another. 

I think if I do ever take up travelling, it'll be the food that tempts me. Can you imagine a sweet pastry based tour? I can feel a plan taking shape... 

This is my new favourite room in our house. 

It's the smallest bedroom, on the first floor, next to the bathroom. We've never needed it as a bedroom, and so for years it's been used as a workshop. Or, more accurately, workshop-and-dumping-ground-for-things-that-don't-have-a-home. It had a proper workbench screwed to the wall by the window, shelves full of tools, hundreds of tiny draws full of little screws and Useful Things. 

It was basically what other people would call a shed, except we don't have space for one in our garden, so ours was in the house. 

Many things have been made in this room over the years. I imagine it's saved us a lot of money, because we've been able to fix, build, make things ourselves rather than buying new. Its state of untidiness has been a frequent source of frustration over the years ('where *is* that screwdriver??') and it's been cleared out and refilled more times than you can imagine. 

​This time though, it's cleared for good, and it's temporarily my favourite room in the house. 

It needs a lot of work, which just couldn't be done with all the workshop stuff in there, so everything has had to come out. The window frame was missing. There's a large hole in the wall where you can see the original, 118 year old lath and plaster. There were many, many small holes in the wall from things being screwed to it - each of them now filled. We've moved the plug sockets, which were half way up the wall - useful for a workshop, but ridiculous in a bedroom. 

There are holes in the floorboards, and they sag so much they don't meet the skirting board. There's no door. And don't even look at those (now apparently illegal) polystyrene ceiling tiles - they're staying put. 

It's been difficult to know how much to do as we prepare this old house for sale. We've been here a long time, and many rooms are still decorated in the woodchip put up by the person before (or possibly the person before them). It doesn't look great, but if we take it off, the plaster comes off too. We don't want to spend months renovating the entire house from top to bottom, but it does need a bit of a tidy up - which means compromises and ignoring some things else we'd be here for another ten years. 

We're doing much of it ourselves, and treating it as 'practice' for our new house. I realise we'd get on more quickly if we paid someone else, but that would take a lot of the fun (and some of the frustration, admittedly) out of it. 

In the meantime, everywhere is chaos. We've cleared the cellar, and refilled it with over 70 boxes of books, clothes, stuff - with yet more to come. Somehow the house doesn't look that much less full. The floor in every room is covered in half filled boxes, tins of paint, things that were in a cupboard that's now been dismantled. Right now it doesn't really feel much like home. 

So in the midst of all this, I'm enjoying this ex-workshop room for its sheer emptiness. I go in several times a day, just to stand there. In the morning, you can see the sun rise over the city and if the weather's right the whole room takes on a glow. 

Of course, now all the boxes are in the cellar we can get back to the decorating, and soon this room too will become filled with paint tins and saws and wood, and my peaceful little haven will be temporarily lost. But this will likely be the first room to be finished, with a borrowed single bed and a comfortable chair and a rug, and at that point I'll reclaim it as a place to sit amidst the chaos of the rest of the house.