House Notes: News of the Woman Who Lived Here Before Us

I found out recently that the woman who lived in this house before us died on New Year’s Eve.

It wasn’t dramatic how I heard. Just a small piece of information, passed on quietly, in the way these things usually are. And yet it stopped me for longer than I expected. Not because I knew her — I didn’t — but because suddenly the house felt different in our hands.

Until then, she had been an abstract presence. “The previous owner.” But learning that she had died so recently closed that distance.

In truth, I had known her in a way — or at least, I had known of her. She was the woman people on the street recognised for sweeping the pavement outside the house. A small, habitual act that made her familiar to those passing by. And inside the house, the brushes she left behind remain well-used. Seeing them now, it’s hard not to feel a connection.

Old houses do this. They blur the line between then and now. You can live quite comfortably pretending you’re the beginning of the story, until something reminds you that you aren’t. That this place held a whole life before it held yours..

There’s something particularly poignant about the timing. New Year’s Eve is such a symbolic moment — an ending wrapped in anticipation of a beginning. While we were thinking forward, making plans, imagining what the next chapter of this house might look like, hers was closing.

It didn’t change anything for us day-to-day. But it did shift a sense that what we’re doing here isn’t just alteration, but continuation.

I don’t feel sadness exactly. Not grief — that would feel misplaced. But there is a small, respectful heaviness in knowing that the walls around us were part of someone else’s everyday, and that those days have now ended. It makes the house feel less anonymous. Less like a project. More like a place that has been trusted to us, for a time.

Perhaps that’s all this note really is: an acknowledgement. Of her life, lived quietly here. Of the strange intimacy that comes with occupying the same space as someone you never met.

This house was home to three generations of her family. We were told that her final wish was to be driven past the house after she passed — a last look at the place that had framed so much of her life.

Knowing that, it feels right to pause. To recognise that what we’re restoring isn’t just brick and timber, but a place that meant something dear to someone. And, hopefully, it will mean the same to us in time, too.

We’ll fill the rooms with our own noise and routines soon enough. But for now, it feels important to acknowledge the lives that came before — and to carry the house forward with that awareness intact.