At Home

One end of my sofa has a dip in it and the good armchair across the room does not. After noticing how narrow my real use of this room is, I stopped furnishing the parts of it my body never visits.

The most useful object in my kitchen is a beige plastic drying rack with a cracked corner, and the second most useful is a dented pot with a wobbling handle. Neither would survive a photograph. Both have outlasted everything prettier.

Twice a year I shift the lamps, roll up the rug, and count the blankets. Nothing new comes into the flat and nothing goes out. It takes an afternoon and it changes how the rooms feel more than anything I have ever bought.

There is a chair in my bedroom that was supposed to be for reading, and it has held a pile of half-worn clothes for six years instead. This is what I stopped trying to fix about it, and the one small thing I did change.

My hallway floor repeats its wood grain every eleven planks and the kitchen cupboards catch every fingerprint. Neither is mine to replace. Here is what I stopped fighting in a rented flat, and the two reversible things that helped most.

A blue bowl broke on the kitchen tiles in February and sat on the windowsill in four pieces for eleven days. What I have learned about repairing things badly, and about the things I have decided are not worth repairing at all.