We’ll decorate when we move

The next house is coming along beautifully. You’ve chosen the kitchen colour, found a table for the dining room and developed surprisingly firm views on utility sinks. There is, as yet, no next house. In this one, a picture has been leaning against the wall for so long that you vacuum around it.

It’s a perfectly good picture. You liked it enough to pay for a frame. But hanging it here would involve deciding where it goes, and you’re going to move anyway. Probably. After Christmas, perhaps, although you said that before the last Christmas, when the tree stood in roughly the place the picture would suit.

Meanwhile, the future sitting room has a lovely sense of proportion. Its windows are magnificent. Nothing in it has been bought in a hurry because you needed somewhere to put the television. You could happily spend the evening there, if it existed.

Back here, the caution makes sense. Moving costs money. A sofa chosen for one flat may be impossible to get upstairs in the next. If you rent, there may be very little you’re allowed to change, and even less reason to spend money changing it. Nobody needs an interiors magazine telling them that a precarious housing situation could be sorted out with better cushions.

Still, ‘when we move’ is wonderfully accommodating. It will cover a kitchen you can’t replace and a tablecloth you could take out of the drawer this minute. Gradually, quite small pleasures get added to the list. The nice plates stay wrapped. The bowl you were so pleased to find stays in a box, because there isn’t a shelf for it. There is a table, admittedly, but you’d rather work out the whole room first.

Even buying the place doesn’t necessarily settle this. Now you’re waiting until you do the kitchen.

Then one Sunday you need the big serving spoon. You’ve promised to take a salad to lunch, which now needs transporting. The spoon must be in the box with the bowl. You cut through the tape and uncover a tea towel wrapped around something much nicer than you remembered.

For a moment you hold it up to the light. All those evenings eating salad out of the plastic mixing bowl, while this sat two feet away. You rinse it and put it on the table. The spoon is underneath, along with a pair of candlesticks you’d forgotten you owned. Lunch is now in some danger of being late.

The tablecloth comes out too. It’s creased, but most of the creases disappear beneath the bowl. That small patch of colour makes you look again at the room around it: the plain wall, the old wooden chairs, the daylight falling across the table. You hadn’t thought much of this corner before. It was usually where the recycling waited.

When you bring the bowl home, you leave it out. By Wednesday it contains two lemons and a receipt. This is a considerable improvement on storage: you can see it, use it, and conduct the familiar search for the receipt without opening six cupboards.

The rest happens unevenly. You still hate the bathroom tiles. The future kitchen remains excellent, and there’s no harm in visiting it occasionally. But a couple of the nice plates make it into the everyday cupboard, where they will have to cope with toast. You move the recycling. There is enough room by the window to eat breakfast without balancing the plate on yesterday’s post.

The picture is still on the floor. You still haven’t sorted out how to hang it. On Saturday morning, you sit at the table with your toast and look across at it. You’ve turned it round, though. All this time, the good side was facing the wall.