‘It Was the Right Time To Do It’: Moving House, the Life‐Course and Kairos

Abstract

While much has been written on the two issues of home and of residential mobility, little has been written on the experience of moving house. This paper aims to fill this gap. While work on residential mobility has tended to conceptualise it in terms of transitions in the life‐course as triggering moves, this paper explores how these moves are experienced and narrated by those moving house. In doing so, it develops the concept of kairos, an ancient Greek notion of time meaning the ‘right time’ to act. I argue that people who move house narrate their moving experiences in such terms: they saw an opportunity to move home, an opportunity that arose at just the right time and their timely actions meant that they seized the moment. It is through such narratives of kairos that homes are created and (re‐)constituted.

Keywords:

• moving house
• home
• kairos
• narratives
• life‐course

Notes

1. The stories discussed are based upon qualitative research undertaken during an ESRC‐funded PhD (Ref. No. R991101) at Lancaster University. Entitled ‘Moving Stories’, the research examined the practices and processes of moving house for 25 households through qualitative interviews before, during and after the move. In order to recruit these households I went to estate agents in the locality and found out which houses had recently been sold; about 70 houses were identified in this way. I then posted letters through the doors of these houses letting the owners know who I was, briefly outlining the research and inviting them to take part. I let them know that I would be returning the next evening to talk through the research in more detail if they wanted, and to arrange a proper time to visit and conduct the initial interview. Of all the households that were identified about half were in when I visited (or re‐visited) and about two‐thirds of these agreed to take part – although one or two dropped out before or after the first visit. The method had a number of effects. First of all, it enrolled participants who would not normally have agreed to take part in such research if either they had had to return calls and ‘make the running’, especially as they were in the middle of a rather busy and stressful period. Yet, as can be seen by the recruitment figures (two‐thirds of those spoken to agreed to take part) this proved a very successful method. Second, by focusing on houses sold during a short period of two–three weeks I managed to contact all households selling during that time, which also meant that all things being equal this group ought to be representative of households moving at all times in the year and not just during the few weeks that I was looking. Indeed this representativity could be seen in that the interviewees ranged across age, class, family/household circumstances, housing type and destination – local or national.

However, this method also had a number of issues. By focusing solely on houses that were being bought and sold I was focusing my attentions in the main on owner‐occupiers, missing out tenants and first‐time buyers. This though was not exactly the case. Because estate agents refused to talk to me about individual properties I simply posted letters to all houses which had been ‘sold’, this actually revealed more than those who were about to move. Sometimes the owner was not the occupier and so I managed to speak to private tenants who were about to move. Sometimes, the house was advertised as ‘Sold subject to contract’, but the sale had gone through and the move had already taken place. This meant that I spoke to those who had only just moved into this house, their new home, and sometimes they were owner‐occupiers, including first‐time buyers, but also were tenants who had again only recently moved into the house. Hence, while I had set up the method to target owner‐occupiers the resultant set of interviewees was more diverse than this. However, it still failed to reach public sector tenants, or private tenants who were simply moving between lets.

All of the names used within the paper are pseudonyms, moreover various circumstances have been changed a little in order to further disguise the participants' true identities as much as possible without undermining their sociological and geographical integrity.