Jumble

We had a painter/decorator in our house for a few weeks and he’s just about finished the first tranche of rooms - the family room, piano room, and living room are done. They look great.

However, what I’m struck by is the fact that the rooms aren’t really transformed…they’re nice, but they still look fundamentally the same. My wife has posited (and I’m inclined to agree with her) that it’s because our furniture is the same.

I don’t know about everybody else’s furniture, but ours is a real hodgepodge. When we bought our first house in Sweden, we didn’t have much furniture and so we agreed to buy whatever was in the house at the time. That gave us a bed, some sideboards, a rug or two, a coffee table, two armchairs, and a sofa. All well and good, but now they’re all nearing seven years in our possession, and an unknown amount of time in somebody else’s. What’s more, they were chosen (possibly from IKEA) with a small Stockholm apartment in mind, rather than our current Yorkshire farmhouse vibe.

We’ve picked up a few pieces over the years, but usually out of necessity rather than love: sideboards and beds from Argos because we needed next day delivery during the COVID lockdowns. An ex-display room sofa set from DFS because of an impending baby. A dining room set that came with this house. A desk my work shipped to me.

Worse than those pieces are the things we’ve inherited. Both our respective parents hate to throw functioning things away (you can see where we get it from!) but don’t want to be lumbered with mounds of ugly furniture. Clearly, donating it to their children is the obvious solution. In recent years, we’ve become better at refusing these gifts, but the damage has already been done and we’re still creaking under the weight of inherited knick-knacks.

Very little of our furniture was actually bought with this house in mind. Our bedroom wardrobes and chests of drawers were chosen and painted specifically for the space they’re in now. Otherwise, we’ve got room after room of stuff…none of which is great, but all of which kind of fulfils a function.

Neither my wife nor I have become comfortable with replacing a functioning item, simply because another one would look better. But that leaves us with a house full of functioning junk. The alternative sounds better - spend some money, get a nice house. The problem there is the decisions that entails.

I’d like to have a nice house, and don’t mind paying for that. But working out exactly which sofa to buy, and how that works with the mirror, and which accessories we need, and agreeing all of that with my wife…that just sounds like too much. There are people you can pay for this - interior designers. But I worry that they’d give me a quotation of £10,000 for new furniture in a living room and I’d panic and say that it was too much - we already have a living room that works.

How could I possibly justify spending that much to end up with a living room that also works?

Of course, we’ve got the kids to excuse us. “Why bother buying anything new when the kids will wreck it in five minutes?” How long will we rest on that one? With three small children spread over seven years, there’ll be a small person to blame for our inaction for at least a decade.

Painting the walls felt like an easy decision, because they live with the house and were chipped and scuffed and dark. Buying new furniture sounds good in abstract, but in reality, it feels like a mountain. I’m inclined to think we just haven’t understood how much it costs to outfit a house. Because it’s possible to buy relatively cheap furniture, we have no real awareness of the cost of one nicely done living room.

How long will we live with the jumble? How do we break the cycle? A breaking point. A skip. And then slowly and deliberately rebuilding our stock of furniture, piece by piece.