Moving Things Around Each Season
Last Saturday I moved the reading lamp from the left side of the sofa to the right, unplugged the timer, rolled the small rug up, and carried it to the cupboard under the stairs. It took about forty minutes including the vacuuming underneath, which was worse than I expected. Nothing came into the flat and nothing left it. By the evening the room felt like a different room and I could not have told you exactly why.
The shuffle happens twice
Once in early spring and once around the middle of summer, and then in reverse in October and again in December when the light goes properly short. It is not a system and there is no list. It starts because I notice, usually at breakfast, that something is in the wrong place for the current sun, and then I spend the rest of the day fixing it and finding two more.
The trigger is nearly always the light. The sun moves along the buildings opposite over the course of the year, and by August it comes in high and short and hard, and by November it comes in low and long and thin. Furniture that made sense against one of those makes no sense against the other, and I would rather move a chair than sit in the wrong place for four months.
The lamps move first
In summer I use two lamps. In winter I use five, including one on the floor behind the sofa that does nothing except stop the corner from going black at four in the afternoon. The floor one lives in the cupboard from May to September because in summer it is just a cable to trip on.
The bedside lamp swaps sides too, which sounds pointless and is not. In summer I want it away from the window so I can sleep with the curtain open. In winter I want it close, because I read for longer and the window is a cold wall of glass I would rather not have next to my shoulder.
The rug goes into the cupboard
The small wool rug in the living room comes up in June and goes back down in October. There is no design logic to that, only that in summer I want bare boards under my feet and in winter I do not. The floor underneath is a shade darker where the rug has been sitting, and every June that rectangle is a small surprise, and every October it disappears again.
The one thing I have learned is to roll it with the pile facing out, because rolled the other way it develops a curl at the edges that takes a fortnight to flatten and catches every toe in the meantime. I learned that the slow way, on a rug I then had to weigh down with books for two weeks while it decided to lie flat again.
Blankets get counted
Every July I take all the blankets out of the ottoman and put them on the bed and look at them. Not to get rid of them, though occasionally one goes. Mostly it is so I know what I have, because by February I will have four of them in rotation between the sofa and the bed and I will have lost track of which one has the hole.
This year the count was seven, which is too many for one person in a two-bedroom flat, and I moved two of them to the spare room and left it at that. I did not throw anything away. There is a real chance that in January I will be glad of all seven, and a blanket takes up very little space compared to how much it changes an evening.
What never moves
The bed, because there is exactly one wall it fits against. The bookshelves, because they are heavy and full and I have made peace with them. The kitchen, entirely, because a kitchen is arranged around where your hands go and mine have learned this one. The table stays where it is because it is under the light fitting, and moving it would mean an extension cable across a walkway, which is the sort of thing I do once and regret for a season.
So the shuffle is really about four or five objects: two lamps, a rug, a chair, and whatever is on the mantelpiece. It is a smaller operation than it sounds and it does more than its size suggests. An afternoon, a vacuum, and a cupboard door, and the flat resets without a single delivery.
Why I keep doing it
Partly because it is the cheapest way I know to make a room feel new. Partly because moving furniture is the only reliable way I ever clean behind furniture, and the dust behind a bookcase in October is genuinely alarming. But mostly because the alternative, in the years when I did not do it, was a slow feeling that the flat had gone stale, and that feeling is dangerous, because it is the feeling that makes me want to buy something.
The rooms I like best in other people’s homes always seem slightly in motion, as though somebody moved a chair last week for a reason. Rooms that have not been touched in five years have a stiffness you can feel from the doorway. Mine has a rolled rug in a cupboard and a lamp in the wrong place until October, and I would rather that than the stiffness. Nothing about it is finished, which I think is most of the appeal. In two months the lamp goes back and the rug comes out and I will do the whole thing again in the other direction.
