New House, New Decoration

By Sylvie, France.

Some things stay because they are useful, some because they were gifts, and some simply because nobody has decided what to do with them yet. Then there are the things we are quite happy to leave behind.

I have a popcorn machine in my house that I never use.

It was a gift from my mother, which is probably one reason it is still there. But if I want popcorn, there are easier ways. You can buy a bag, put it in the microwave and it is finished. The children are not at home anymore, my husband does not use the machine, and neither do I.

Still, I have it.

That is the strange thing about objects. Something can have almost no practical place in your life and still have a place in your cupboard.

There are other things like that. I have a place with old phones and cables, the collection that seems to grow because you are never completely sure which cable you may need again. I also have painting things that my daughter brought me. Those are different because they are not hidden away. I can see them every day.

She asks me, “Mom, you have time during the week. We are not here.”

Yes, perhaps. But seeing something every day does not necessarily mean you will do it. Sometimes it means you become very good at seeing past it.

By the time I have done everything I need to do, I prefer sitting on my sofa and watching Netflix. Most of the time I only sit down at about nine in the evening. At that point, I am happy. I do not want another project.

The gift problem

It is more difficult to get rid of something when it was a gift.

If somebody I like gives me something, I will keep it. The same is true if the person does not have much money and the gift was significant for them. Then the object means more than the object itself.

But this rule is not absolute.

My husband once gave me a pottery vase. It looked old-fashioned and it simply did not suit our apartment. Later, when we moved house, I saw my opportunity.

I got rid of it.

Fortunately, my husband was there when I did it, and he did not remember the vase particularly well. There had been so many things by then that it was okay.

And moving gave me the perfect explanation: new house, new decoration.

Sometimes a new beginning is useful.

There have probably been clothes as well — things we bought together that I did not really like and later sold at the market. A gift can carry a memory without necessarily needing to remain in the house forever.

The things that suddenly become visible

There are also objects you live with for so long that you stop noticing them.

At the moment, I want to change the curtains in one of our rooms. I spoke to my husband about it a few days ago. My idea is to take a photograph of the room and ask ChatGPT for some new ideas.

Curtains are easy enough. They are decoration. I can decide that I want something different, although I may still need my husband, his tools and the ladder.

Changing the floor is another matter.

If I want new tiles, then I need his agreement because it becomes a big job. The old floor has to come out, there will be dirt everywhere, and somebody has to do the work. The same applies if I want to paint the walls or change their colour.

In our house, there seems to be a practical division between the things I can decide and the things that become my husband’s work.

That division extends to instruction manuals.

I hate reading them.

If something needs to be understood from a booklet, I am very happy to leave it to my husband while I do something else. We recently had trouble with our printer because the sentences were not aligned properly. My daughter needed to print something, and we could not find the reason.

This time, I asked ChatGPT.

I found the solution myself, and I was so happy. I had fixed something without reading the manual.

That was a small victory.

Our oven is another story. It works, but not perfectly. We discovered that sometimes, after an electrical problem, we cannot simply turn the temperature straight up. We have to increase it little by little, sometimes in two steps, and then it works. My husband checked it once and we found this solution, but he has not had time to investigate it properly again.

He has other things to do.

At the moment, there are cypress trees demanding his attention. We have many of them, around five or six metres high, and once a year they need what is basically a very large haircut. It is dangerous work. This year, for the first time, we used a company to cut some of them because I recommended that my husband get help.

There is always something to do when you have a house.

A life measured in keys

Perhaps the most ordinary objects in my life are my keys.

I have so many that sometimes I am not even sure what all of them open.

My husband and I started together in one apartment, then moved to another apartment and eventually into our house. Over the years, the keys accumulated. There are car keys and house keys, and old-looking keys for doors inside the house that are difficult to distinguish from one another.

Then there are the keys that connect me to other parts of my life.

I have keys for the office, including what I need if I am the first person there or have to deal with the alarm. I have keys for my mother because when I visit her, she cannot move very easily and I need to be able to open the door myself. I have keys connected to other family responsibilities.

And then there is the tennis club.

There are keys for the main door, other parts of the building, the outside areas and different places around the tennis facilities. There seem to be keys everywhere.

Individually, they look completely ordinary. Together, they are almost a map of a life: home, family, work, tennis, responsibility.

You only realise how important such an ordinary object is when you imagine it disappearing.

The rules change when you cross a border

Objects were not the only thing on my mind this week.

On Sunday and Monday, my husband and I finally used an overnight stay that his colleagues had given him two years ago. We had already done one stay during the summer at a wellness spa hotel in Germany. This time we stayed in an old castle not far from home.

The castle itself did not have a spa or wellness centre, but on Sunday evening we had a Michelin-starred dinner and stayed overnight. After breakfast the next morning, we went to a nearby spa and spent the whole Monday there.

I was surprised by how many people were there on a Monday. It was not only older people either. There was a real mixture of ages.

The weather was good, so we could lie outside in the sun, sleep and relax. It was very nice.

But there is one thing about German saunas that is completely different from France.

The clothes.

Two weeks earlier, I had been to a wellness sauna in France with a friend. There, you wear a bikini or swimwear. In Germany, it is the opposite. In the sauna, you are expected to be naked.

Not approximately naked. Naked.

You take your towel with you and sit on it. In some of the saunas, somebody comes in and moves a towel through the air, making the heat feel even stronger. In a large spa there can be many different saunas, with different smells and experiences.

But you do not sit there in your swimming costume.

If you try, people will point it out and you may be told to leave.

I sit on my towel and cross my legs.

Going out can be the more uncomfortable part, because other people may be standing behind you waiting to come in. It is simply the way it works there, but when you know the French version as well, the difference is impossible not to notice.

That made me curious about South Africa. Do people have saunas there? Are they something you find in spas or gyms? Do people have them at home?

Janita told me that they do exist. Some gyms and spas have them, and people can even install them at home or in the garden. Her childhood memory was of an uncle who had a swimming pool and sauna in his backyard. She and her cousins would sit in the sauna in their swimwear, get too hot, run outside and jump into the swimming pool. If the pool became too cold, they would run back into the sauna.

It sounded much closer to the French rule than the German one.

And perhaps that is what I like about these small differences. You can live only a short distance away from another country and discover that something completely normal on one side of the border is strange on the other.

The same is true at home.

A popcorn machine can stay in a cupboard for years because it was a gift. An ugly vase can survive until a house move finally gives you the excuse you need. Painting materials can sit in full view until you almost stop seeing them. A handful of keys can quietly contain your home, your work, your family and your tennis club.

We keep some things because they matter.

We keep others because throwing them away feels more difficult than leaving them exactly where they are.

And occasionally, all you need is the right moment to look at something again and say: new house, new decoration.