Knowing when to let go...
(...of a great piece of furniture that just doesn't work)
I’ve been known, on occasion…ahem…to impulse buy large pieces of furniture. I fall in love and I convince myself (and in this case my partner) that it’s perfect, perfect I tell ya! I lose sight of all logic and no-one can convince me otherwise. It’s like having beer goggles for furniture - all I see is beauty, sexiness, never any flaws or reasons maybe it’s not such a good idea...
Sometimes my impulse pays off but other times I have to endure a walk of shame.
The huge glass fronted cabinet I bought years back because it was too cheap not to has been endlessly useful, first as a pantry in a kitchen that had little built-in storage, then as a prop cupboard in my office and now a china cabinet for all the ceramic bits I can’t not buy (now there’s another topic to write about).
But last year I bought quite a big dining table from a local antique shop and try as I might, I haven’t been able to make it work in our little seaside bungalow. I actually pictured it eventually being a massive desk and work table in my garden studio which hadn’t yet been built, but I thought it could be our dining table in the meantime. We like to have dinner parties and a huge table would always come in handy, I thought.
Fast forward about a year, three Christmas dinners, a handful of parties and a garden studio still not built and I have come to terms with the fact that it is JUST TOO BIG. It isn’t going to work in the house or the future studio, no matter how much I like it and it’s lovely legs, drawers and worn surface. And so it must go.
When it comes to our homes (and the contents of our wardrobes if we’re honest) I think we can sometimes get stuck on an idea - of how we want to live, who we want to be, the home we want to have, the way we want to be perceived, even - and while I’m all for being aspirational, it’s important also to work with what we have and how we actually live now.
You know how they say (the proverbial ‘they’) dress for the job you want, not the job you have? I don’t think the same is true of our homes. Maybe I aspire to live in a rambling many-roomed villa (I do), but it would be silly to buy furniture for my aspirational home in the hope that it would eventually lead me to owning that home. No matter how much you may believe in the power of manifesting, I do still think it’s important to decorate for the home you live in now. But if you shop wisely many pieces will travel well into your future homes anyway.
So I got caught up in an idea, a fantasy and I bought a dining table for the rambling manor house I’d like, not the bungalow by the sea we actually live in.
It’s frustrating when you’ve spent money on something but realise it’s wrong. And when it’s something large you have the added annoyance of logistics - unloading large furniture requires men and vans and additional costs. But usually there is a way to recoup most, if not all of your money on the many resell apps out there - FB Marketplace, eBay, Vinterior etc. Or in my case, another local antique shop who wants to buy it.
I can also be impulsive about getting rid of things too quickly so I sat on this idea for a while, debating hiring a van and putting it into my prop storage container or waiting until after Christmas so we can entertain without making guests stand and balance plates and glasses, or keeping it and just living with the mistake. But as soon as you accept that something isn’t right, it becomes difficult to ignore.
Now that it’s decided, I can’t wait for it to be gone next week. I remember before it got delivered, loving how open the room felt, how spacious, especially with the high ceilings. When it arrived it took up half the room but I swallowed any regret I may have felt and focused instead on its gorgeousness.
As much as we love to entertain, most of the time it’s just the two of us. And that’s what I mean about designing for your actual day to day life. So the idea is to go back to my original plan (at least according to every dining image I’ve posted to Pinterest since I bought the house and even before), and find a round one that extends to an oval when we have guests.
Convincing my boyfriend of the positives of a round table hasn’t been easy, but I remind him of the time we squeezed no less than 10 (maybe even 12?) people around a tiny 1 metre diameter round table for Easter in my old house. Because, no corners means so limits!
In the meantime I’m happy to live with the space where a table will go rather than rush into another mistake. In fact, that tiny round table we used for Easter is still in the loft…
Here are a few images I come back to year after year and not just because they all have my favourite pop of red. Have you made any impulse furniture buys that you regret? And what have you done, sucked it up or made a change?
