Róisín Ingle on ... changing the rooms

I’ve thrown a lot of what’s known as good money after bad while trying to sort things in my house over the years. (Ikea, you know I love you and your meatballs and that weird marshmallow cake, but you cannot deny all that ‘good money after bad’ that flows through your cash registers. The rivers of it.)

Those black plastic shoe holder gizmos seemed like an essential purchase but only until their resemblance to depressing office box-files began to, as a friend says, “grind my gears”. All the acres of minimalist storage boxes I bought eventually, some might say ironically, started to cause me a serious storage problem. When a friend/sister/random stranger would ask me “do you want this chair?” - an awful lot of people have asked me this over the years, my advice: just say no - I kept saying yes. So I’ve too many chairs. And I’ve the wrong chairs in the wrong rooms. I’m reading my latest guru The Life Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo and all of this is becoming even more apparent to me.

Instead of good money after bad, I decide to try to throw a bit of good money after good. Good advice that is. I save up to pay some talented people to look around my house and tell me what they think is “grinding my gears” from a living point of view. I know myself of course but I need it to be seen through other, more aesthetically attuned, eyes.

I have a couple of Wants. And yes they are Wants rather than Needs. “We are all very lucky” I tell my children while at the same time trying to shield them from the stories of all the Not Lucky children in the world until the word loses all meaning and they tease me: “Go on Mum, tell us how lucky we are and about the roof over our heads”.

The Wants: I want to give my children a decent bedroom instead of making them sleep on a second-hand sofa bed while I ponder how to achieve their perfect bedroom. And I want somewhere for guests to stay - really just one guest, my brother who comes once a year for a few weeks - instead of on a mattress in the sitting room.

So I pay good money and the good advice givers say: “What about turning the sitting room into your bedroom and making your bedroom the girl’s bedroom and the girl’s old bedroom the guest room?” If they were making a TV programme of this “makeover”, it would have been the part where the couple who are getting the advice smile enthusiastically at the advice-givers while secretly wondering if there was any way to cancel that money transfer. Woah, what now? Turn the sitting room into a bedroom? Mess with the fundamental Rules of A House? Sitting Rooms Are Not Bedrooms. It’s the law. I came very close at that point to just buying loads of stuff in Ikea instead.

But then I thought about it. We haven’t had a TV in the sitting room for months. We hardly ever go in there anymore. All our “sitting” and our “living” was happening down in the kitchen/dining area. And we have an iPad now which (and how come nobody told me this before?) is basically a portable telly which allows you to watch Fair City anywhere you like and which you can hide in a bookshelf when certain people try to watch too many Horrid Henrys.

We repurposed all the rooms. I sleep in the sitting room now. Except it doesn’t feel like the sitting room. It feels like a bedroom. The orange street light visible at night from outside? Romantic. The gentle hum of the passing trains? Atmospheric. The slanted sunlight through the window on a hungover Saturday morning when the world feels foggy? Seriously beautiful. And the fireplace? The last word in decadence especially if you lash on a firelog.

Even the email from the children’s school announcing the first Nits of the school term can’t ruin my buzz. Although I am writing this while scratching my head. You scratching too now? Sorry.

My brother is staying with me at the moment in the guest room that used to be the children’s room. He was once known at Yoga Boy on this page. But Somatic Sibling is more accurate since years ago he moved in that direction. (The mind-body direction. It’s all one.) He comes home and tells me how everyone in Dublin town is laughing at him because he carries an umbrella while cycling in the rain. But everyone does it in Amsterdam, he says.

I don’t laugh at him. I smile the smile of a woman who goes to sleep in her sitting room and wakes up knowing that is exactly where she is supposed to be. And that we are all very lucky.

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