Turning round in your basket

 My husband has a very pleasing phrase for settling into a new home. He calls it "turning round in your basket."

By now I've almost lost count of the different places I've lived, but this I have noticed — in every new place I've wanted to reconfigure the furniture layout after a few months have gone by.

It's my opinion that the furnishings should follow the way you live, not the other way round. Nobody should have to alter what they want to do or be, according to the dictates of their furniture.

And in a new house, I've looked at the rooms and thought about what we're likely to want to do, based on what we've done in the past, and disposed the furniture. But then, every time, it's turned out that we do things differently here. And so it's been this time.

We came here from a shared house where we tended to be what I think of as "in cell" most of the time. We all retreated to our bedrooms, apart from an hour or two in the evening when I used to watch quiz programmes with Alice and Hebe, just to enjoy each other's company. My husband had his desk and his books and his comfy chair in his enormous bedroom, and my bedroom was titchy so I used to sit on his bed and chat with him.

But here where we have a place of our own, it's all been different. 

My husband has his study, so the layout of that and his bedroom is up to him.

My bedroom during the day is where Clarence the cat sleeps, after he's finished gazing serenely out across the garden and environs from the lofty perch of my bedroom windowsill.

It's the downstairs rooms I needed to re-jig. I thought that once we moved, because my husband is a borough councillor, now we have our own place he'd have an endless procession of people needing to talk with him about issues to do with local politics, and I would have friends and family calling in.

So we made the front room his sitting room and the back room mine.

But that's not what's happened. He still meets up with people in what is designated by the useful term, a "third space" — somewhere that's not his home or theirs, a café or the council building. When I see my family it's more often at their place rather than mine, because I have use of a car and it's that bit further than someone would really want to walk. And we've tended to just sit in one room together, chatting and praying and reading and just being together.

So I changed the furniture round.

In the front room I put our comfy chairs and the fake fire, to make it our homely place to sit and chat and pray and read.

The back room I turned into three zones.

A correspondence zone, with a chair by the little desk that flaps down from the wall, that has some flowers and the statue of Our Lady on it. She stands guard over my writing paper.

A dining zone in the middle for the obvious purpose of eating.

Then, by the double door at the back which opens out onto the garden, two chairs where we can enjoy the morning light and the fresh air when it isn't pouring with rain or freezing cold. Our equivalent of a conservatory, where we can be outside but inside, with the doors open but available if a delivery man calls or something.

We're quite pleased with the result.