Owning part of the house

I can clearly remember crossing off all the French classes I had to do in secondary school before I could drop the subject. I wanted to be rid of it, and I wanted to see the progress I was making towards that goal. I didn't like French! Later I was grateful for everything I learned of that language, but that is another matter. I wanted to visualise getting closer to my goal: not having to learn French in school any more.

There is something entirely different I would now like to get rid of. It's my mortgage! I've had it for four years now, and that is, of course, not enough to get rid of it, but it is four entire years of progress. And I'm the sort of person who likes to see progress. And I had pondered a bit on how to do this. And I had decided that what I could do is calculate how many square metres my house is. And then do a calculation of how much each square metre costs. And then calculate how many of these square metres I have already paid off. And then basically see the house becoming more and more mine. I could slowly work towards owning another room!

One day I was in the dentist's waiting room, and I had some idle time. I knew I had the dimensions of my house, as given by the estate agent at the time, on my phone somewhere. I started calculating the area of each room, and a total area of the entire house. It's not very precise; I don't think these estate agents care about a few centimetres here or there. And they didn't give any dimensions for, for instance, the entrance. But hey, this doesn't have to be precision work. I ended up with my house being some 94 m².

So that was the area of the house. The next thing was the mortgage. How much of that was paid off? And the problem with that is that you don't really know until you paid it off entirely. I know how much money I borrowed, and I know how much of that is still outstanding, but only when you get rid of it do you know how much interest you have paid in the end. But again; this doesn't have to be precision work. And I can keep an eye on my mortgage on the website of the mortgage lender.

I took the simple approach of taking the price of the house at which I had bought it, dividing that by the area, that way calculating how many square metres of the house I didn't own yet, and in that way also calculating how many I did. So now I can do some silly thought experiments on which parts of the house I would want to own first. And check how much of it is already paid off. Would I start with the lounge? It is my favourite room! You can relax there, and read a book, and socialise, and sit by the fire. But when it comes to the practicalities of life, it is probably more crucial to own the bathroom, or the kitchen. It would be rather impractical to not own the spaces that have things like running water, connections to the sewer system, and gas. And a bedroom would be nice too. And there is something unsatisfying about owning various spaces but not owning the connections between them. The landing, for instance, is not on my priorities list. It is a bit of a weird space. It used to be a reasonably sized room, before the staircase down to the kitchen was put in. Now you are left with a strange L-shaped space you can't do much with. It did function as an improvised living room before the real deal was done, though. But were I not to own it, I would have no way of getting into the lounge, or to the upstairs rooms. Choices!

It is all a bit silly, but I do like that I now having a visualisation of how my mortgage is progressing. And it makes it a bit more tangible as well! It's more satisfying to see a lump of money leave your bank account if you can point at the area in your house you bought with it.

Pedants might notice I have only calculated the house. Surely that is inaccurate! I also bought a garage and a big garden. But I chose to focus on the house. And only on the price of the actual house, and not the total amount I will pay, but I suppose that's okay as I calculate on the basis of what is still outstanding and not what I paid off so far. And when the moment comes I paid it all off, I can celebrate also owning the outside spaces. It might be a while, but it will have been worth it!

The living room; setting one back about £21,000!