Things I Cannot Change Here
The floor in my hallway is a laminate the colour of weak tea, printed with a wood grain that repeats every eleven planks. I counted them one evening, on my hands and knees, looking for a contact lens. Eleven. After that I could not stop seeing it, the same knot arriving again and again down the corridor like a song with a very short loop.
The list
Things I cannot change in this flat: the floor, the kitchen cupboards (a shiny cream with a rounded edge), the bathroom tiles, the ceiling fitting in the living room, the front door, which is fine, and the radiator covers, which are not. Things I could technically change and would have to change back at the end: wall colour, shower head, door handles. Things nobody can change: the traffic on Saturday mornings, and the fact that the second bedroom gets no direct sun at any point in the year.
I made this list in my first month here, in a notebook, in a mood. Reading it back now, the striking part is how little of it has actually mattered.
The year I fought the floor
I spent most of that first year trying to cover the hallway. A runner, which slid. A different runner with a grip pad underneath, which bunched at the door and caught the edge every single time it opened. I looked into peel-and-stick planks and read enough forum posts about what they do to laminate underneath to give up on that. At one point I was pricing a very large rug for the living room, chosen entirely to argue with the floor rather than to go with anything, and I did not buy it, and I am still glad.
What actually helped was accepting that the floor is a surface I walk on and mostly do not look at. I look at it when I am cleaning it, or when I am hunting for a lens. The rest of the time my eyes are at standing height, on the walls, the windows, whatever is on the table.
What is worth spending on when it is not yours
My rule now, and it is a soft rule, is that money goes into things that come with me. Lamps. Bedding. Pans. A heavy chopping board. The blanket I use every night of the year. All of that will be in the next place, whenever the next place happens, and none of it needs a landlord to sign anything.
The one exception I make is light. The ceiling fitting in the living room is a small frosted dome that makes everyone look like they are being questioned about a crime. Replacing it would mean a conversation and a note in a file somewhere, so instead I simply stopped switching it on. Three lamps at different heights do the work. Two of them sit on a cheap timer plug, so the room is already warm when I come in, and that one change did more for how this flat feels than any tin of paint would have.
The cupboards, and what I did about them
The kitchen cupboards are the part I still mind. They are shiny in a way that catches every fingerprint, and the rounded edge dates them to within about five years. For a week I considered a temporary film to cover the doors. Then I pictured myself peeling it off in three years with a hairdryer and a scraper while somebody waited to do an inspection, and I let it go.
What I did instead was take the doors off two of them. That is reversible, the doors are under the stairs with their screws in a labelled bag, and now the two shelves I open most often are open all the time. Everyday plates and glasses are visible, the stacked plastic containers are still behind doors where they belong, and the room is roughly a third less shiny. It cost nothing and took twenty minutes. The two shelves are now the only part of that kitchen I would happily show anyone, which says something about doors and something about shine.
Not owning it has a quiet upside
When the boiler stopped in January I sent an email and a man came on the Thursday. I did not have to find him, choose between him and two other quotes, or decide between fixing and replacing at ten at night with a browser full of tabs. That is worth something, and on most days it is worth more to me than a floor I like.
I notice that friends who own their places have a different set of complaints, and the complaints are heavier. Mine are cosmetic and temporary. Theirs come with scaffolding and decisions that follow them around for a decade.
How the flat feels now
None of the ugly parts have gone anywhere. The hallway still repeats every eleven planks and I still notice, though only about once a fortnight now. But the flat smells of coffee and washing powder and, in spring, of the cut stems in the jug on the table. It has good light in the front room from eight until eleven. It has a door I can open onto cold air. Those are the things I register when I come home, and I did not pick any of them out of a catalogue.
If I ever get to choose a floor, I will choose a floor. Until then I have stopped treating the parts I did not choose as a problem waiting for a budget.
