Blog Tour - Devon and Hell by Karen Wheeler

The Publishers have given me an extract to share with my blog readers:

The story so far: Karen Wheeler’s ‘idyllic’ cottage in Devon has revealed a host of unwelcome surprises. In this extract, the author – who has been forced to seek refuge in a nearby holiday park with her dog Biff – tries to deal with the escalating problems at Plum Tree Cottage…

Back in the chalet I make a fish finger sandwich, then slump on the sofa to watch Grand Designs. What better way to relax, after a day of domestic travails, than to enjoy someone else being driven to distraction by renovation gone wrong? Tonight’s episode is a particularly good one, confirming my belief that you have to be stark raving bonkers to try and build a house from scratch. And even if you’re not at the outset, you will be by the end.

The renovators in this episode have squandered £60,000 on windows made-to-order in Bratislava, only to find that when they arrive they are ‘a couple of millimetres out’. Three different sets of builders have downed tools and walked off site. The husband subsequently suffers a heart attack, after an issue involving exposed beams, and from his hospital bed declares that he wishes he’d never embarked on the project.

The wife, shivering in an unheated campervan, gazes at the camera, her hair unwashed and her face filled with angst. ‘It’s been nothing but problems,’ she declares, ‘I’m starting to think the plot’s unlucky.’ The camera pans to the mud bath outside the window and you’d be hard-pressed not to agree.

When Kevin McLeod returns to deliver some poetic musings on the finished build, the owners have both aged by a decade, and have gone from looking smug and loved-up to barely on speaking terms. It doesn’t take a body language expert to know that once Kevin has gone they won’t be sharing the master bedroom suite that ‘melds as one with the surrounding countryside’. It’s now a question of who’ll be the first out of the double-height front door?

There are, I reflect, some advantages to renovating a house alone. My dog is not going to leave me if he doesn’t like the kitchen fittings. And we are never going to argue about the suitability of larch cladding or a concrete worktop. But the wife’s words resonate with me. What if Plum Tree Cottage, like their building plot, is unlucky?

I remember a feature I once wrote on feng shui. According to the Chinese philosophy, a badly placed sofa or a bed or cooker in the wrong place can screw up your entire life. I’m usually on board with ancient beliefs – I’ll sign up to anything that’s firmly grounded in centuries of superstition – but the idea that the position of your gas hob could gobble up your luck? Like the mountain of plastic toys and cheap polyamide clothing that is China’s other export, feng shui struck me as a load of rubbish.

But that was before I wrote the feature. After interviewing the lovelorn and financially challenged whose lives had turned around after painting their (south-facing) sitting room pink, adding a pot plant to the ‘love corner’, or stuffing statues of three-legged toads under their bed, I came to the reluctant conclusion that there might be something in it.

Perhaps the feng shui of Plum Tree Cottage might be lacking in some way? It seems unlikely. For a start, apart from the in-built cupboards in the guest bedroom, which I’ve filled with clothes and boxes of books, the house is empty. There is no furniture, badly placed or otherwise, to cause the dreaded ‘blockages of energy’ – or ‘chi’ – that can turn your life into a disaster zone. Furthermore, when I first visited the cottage – blissfully unaware of the problem proliferating in the drains – I was struck by the lovely ambiance and nicely proportioned rooms. I particularly loved the inbuilt storage cupboards – so useful – and how the front door directly faced the rear door, giving a stunning view of the plum tree and wisteria in the garden.

But now I’m wondering if this could be the problem. As I vaguely recall from my journalistic foray into the subject, it is ‘inauspicious’ feng shui to have a front door facing an exit. I reach for my laptop and type ‘Feng shui – is my house unlucky?’ into a search engine. If there is something I can do to optimise the ‘energy’ – a judiciously positioned bunch of flowers here or a crystal there – I’d like to know about it.

Up pop several websites specialising in home décor and spatial arrangement. I find myself reading a ‘Top Ten’ of feng shui ‘afflictions’. They include living in a cul-de-sac, opposite a T-junction, or next to a graveyard, none of which apply to Plum Cottage. But number one on the list – I might have known – is a front door directly facing a rear door. This means that good luck and positive energy come in through the front door and then rush straight out the back – which is probably what I should do if I had any sense.

The website belongs to someone called Harsh Jain and he seems to have a large and grateful following. I read on, intrigued by the advice he dispenses on everything from what to do if you have a bathroom in the southwest sector of your home – basically rip it out, if you don’t want to flush all your ‘blessings’ down the drain – to the importance of a ‘good, solid headboard’ in your bedroom if you are looking for love. ‘And never give in to the temptation of painting your entire house red,’ he advises, as if there were people out there actually considering it.

The queries on Harsh Jain’s website range from the woeful ‘Help me, please! We’ve moved into an apartment where the bathroom is in my love corner and my boyfriend now sleeps with his back to me’, to the perfectly chilling, ‘Where in my property should I bury my dog?’

Another unhappy soul, Suleiman, writes: ‘Help me, sir; I am stuck in a quagmire! My kitchen is in the southwest and it is a rental property so I cannot do anything about it.’

‘The worst house in the world is one with kitchen in southwest,’ Harsh replies. (This guy really lives up to his name.) ‘It is disaster for finances as well as relationships. You need to create bedroom in southwest. If you cannot do that then please start sleeping in kitchen. Only when you sleep there will you get good financial luck.’

I picture Suleiman rolling out a camp bed next to the cooker and feel a shiver of schadenfreude. Intrigued, I click on the home page to find out more about Harsh Jain. ‘I am an expert in feng shui as well as a master of vastu shastra,’ he has written.

Vastu what? I type the words into a search engine and discover that vastu shastra is ‘a 5,000-year-old science of home building, architecture and space arrangement originating in India.’ The left hemisphere of my brain (logic and analysis) tells me this is superstitious nonsense. The right side (creativity, intuition and, almost certainly, gullibility) asks Who am I to argue with a 5,000-year-old philosophy and the wisdom of India’s elders? After all, if I’d heeded the advice of my favourite astrologer and waited a week before signing for Plum Tree Cottage, I wouldn’t be in this mess now. There would have been time to wait for the drains CCTV pictures to come through, and I would have taken one look at those awful, rodenty images and pulled out of the sale.

I log on to my email and type. ‘Dear Harsh, please can you tell me if a front door facing a rear door is unlucky? And, if so, what I can do about it?’

Almost immediately he replies, ‘Please sending me $100 and floor plan of your house. Then I send these vital informations telling you if your place is unlucky or not.’ I think about it… for all of three seconds. Then I log into Paypal and send Harsh $100, and a link to the estate agent’s details and floor plan. I wonder if this will be the last I hear from him. For all I know, his real name is Kevin Smith and he’s sitting in a bedroom in Pinner, laughing his pyjamas off at my stupidity.

But no, ten minutes later, an email pings back. ‘Are you already living in this house? Can you pull out of the sale?’

My heart hits the floor. Pull out of the sale? This suggests that the problems of Plum Tree Cottage cannot be cured with a pot plant and three-legged toad. Dry-mouthed, I type, ‘I have already bought the house.’

The reply comes back, ‘OK. Please don’t panic.’

Like any sensible person, I take this to mean, ‘You should totally panic! Run for the door and do not stop to pick up your belongings.’

‘I will send report and solutions soon,’ Harsh Jain promises. ‘But for God’s sake, please don’t be putting anything in the cupboards in your bedroom.’

I drop my head into my hands. The cupboards are the least of my worries. I knew it. Plum Tree Cottage is unlucky.

Thank you to the publishers and Random Things Blog Tours for inviting me to take part in the tour and for a copy of the book in return for an honest review.