My house is huge and beautiful, but decrepit. My family has owned it for five generations. It has sweeping verandahs, multiple roof angles, and large rooms with high ceilings and wide-board timber floors. It has five bedrooms and three bathrooms, a huge kitchen, a living area, a dining room, and a couple of other rooms that at times had TVs, overflowing bookcases, games, soft couches, and room for people to relax on their own. The only rooms I use are my bedroom, the kitchen, and a bathroom. All this is surrounded by the verandahs broad enough for ping-pong tables, dining tables and chairs, and hammocks. Outside, there is a meat house that is just one room, a cool room, and extra quarters that used to be for maids and cooks.

In earlier times, it featured on glossy pages in fashionable lifestyle magazines: the backdrop for my parents, freshly washed, seated, looking attractive and significant at an artisan’s timber table on that verandah above a lush, colour-filled garden. Even though the articles featured the house and the ‘flair’ that was evident in my mother’s decorations, as well as the garden she reinvigorated and toiled in to create effortless beauty, the photos revealed it as no more than a humble offering to my father. Nothing, no matter how beautiful or hard-worked-for, existed without his approval. Once you passed this mailbox and crossed the front ramp, everything was owned by him. That was my father: squattocrat and autocrat.

These days, my house would not grace the pages of a giveaway newspaper or a failing website. The roof needs work. The bathrooms need work. The stumping needs work. I don’t have the money, the skill, or the patience to fix these things, and since Sarah left, I don’t have the inclination. So if the roof leaks, I put a bucket under it. If the floors lean, I lean back.

I take the box home as if it was long-awaited (four working days for delivery, actually), and put it on the kitchen island. It looks a little worse for wear, as if they had run out of new boxes and had to use a second-hand one. Entirely possible. I get a knife from the drawer, insert it in the top line of the box, then cut, rip, and tear like a birthday-blessed six-year-old. There is probably three times the amount of packing tape these companies normally use, but let’s face it: opening is half the fun, right?