All change

Day 57

There is no such thing as a perfect room, at least, none that I have inhabited - they can always be tweaked or improved somehow. One of my most familial habits is to change rooms around, happily searching for that elusive, perfect set-up.

My mum did it, my sister did it, and I have always done it. The children adjusted admirably to coming home from school and finding everything in a different place. They would get a bit annoyed if I did it to their rooms without permission though, so I learnt, just as quickly, to leave well alone there.

We moved house a lot, so our furniture never quite fitted the new rooms it had to furnish, necessitating the shifting, sorting, re-jigging and altering, in order to make it work. My husband knows that his socks only have a temporary permanence in their present drawer, that any week I could decide that another cupboard fits better in the room. Thankfully, he is OK with this.

I spent yesterday moving all the furniture in our sitting room around. We have a long, thin, dark room in a beautiful house, but, come the autumn when the heating is switched on, the sofa (which blocks the radiator all summer) has to be reassigned elsewhere. In this room, there aren't too many options where, and because it is dark, all the plants have to find new places as well.

Today, the shifting I did yesterday, will invoke more knock-on work today. I have already swapped my husband over to the other side of the bed, bookcases now need moving, more plants reallocating (trouble is, they keep getting bigger and I'm more than running out of space), and bedside tables reshuffling.

When it is all done, it will seem for a while to be the perfect set-up. I will enjoy it and feel proud of my endeavours, and keep it tidy and sparkling for a time. It will feel like a new house, and I do so love a new house.

They say that the brain only sees a small percentage of what the eye actually registers, that it uses it's own library of images to fill in the blanks. I find that after a while, I stop seeing my house as it is, it all becomes wallpaper, rather stale, a bit too much under the radar. If I change it all around, rearrange my teapot collection, the family photos, the tea-lights, cushions and pictures, then I really see them again.

I hate waste and I dislike padding. I believe in William Morris's philosophy of having nothing in my house that I do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. I add on, however, anything that has great sentimental value, ie. the anatomically impossible clay cat that your kid made at school.

Anything in my wardrobe that I have not worn in a year gets sent to charity or handed onto friends, and books I have read get recirculated through the same channels. If you move house a lot, big, heavy, boxes of books you will never read again are the first things to go, believe me.

So I dislike the idea of the things that I do have and love, being constantly passed over by my jaded eye. It does me good to refresh them by moving them to a new place, where for a while they will be seen and appreciated. I live in a beautiful house, as I said, and this is my way of putting value on that.

P.S. Hi Janine, my lovely girl, thanks for being there.