Setting up house with the things you really love

Boxes, suitcases and bags sat on the floor, on chairs, windowsills, on each other and, in an attempt to create a through route and a semblance of a living room, they were piled behind the sofa which had been dragged into the centre of the space.

“You should get a skip,” said a beautifully ordered friend as if I were going to live with this boxed-in life permanently – a particularly challenging candidate for a TV programme about hoarders.

“Twenty years of Emma, I love it,” said a more philosophical friend. “It should be an art installation,” he said pouring celebratory moving-in champagne. There were even decent glasses to drink it from, because I wasn’t starting from scratch, I was starting over after more than two decades of sharing a family home.

Everything in this new home had been chosen, extricated from a larger house into which its various inhabitants had poured their things. There is always a place to put something in a family home, which cannot be reasonably expected to be minimalist, and over the years the accoutrements meld into the very walls. It is daunting but fascinating to reverse the process and extract not only what is considered yours but also, it turns out, what is, essentially, the essence of you. Some things that came to my new life were carefully chosen, some were thrown into bags as the moving deadline loomed for sorting later, and some things had to be left reluctantly behind.

And so what you land with is a woolly, and material, version of you, ready to be gradually pared back and added to as you spend time up close with yourself, getting an undiluted look at who you were, are and will be.

Many of us go from childhood homes, to flat-shares and then setting up home with a partner and perhaps adding in babies, so should you later end up living alone it is often the first time you get to be with your chosen things (and some unwanted baggage). It is a life’s worth – from childhood furniture and mementoes, vinyl LPs from teenage years, scores of books, a collection of industrial lamps and clothes.

“Everything’s old,” said my friend’s tech-savvy 10-year-old daughter, contemplating my hand-operated Singer sewing machine, a turntable (with built-in radio) for that vinyl, the Bauhaus and Anglepoise lamps. “Shh,” said her mother but it’s okay. Old mixed with new – the modern kitchen with its Thonet chairs.

“Celebrate your amazing, quirky style,” said my sister. “And put your extraordinary things on show – it’s you,” while simultaneously hurling bags I might need one day, and pricey but pointless corporate gifts, into the back of her car and driving off before I could look. I don’t miss them. And so I’m gradually editing: “curate”, suggests my art-historian daughter. My scores of books have been awarded a wall of shelves to themselves and the quirky finds are on the top of the kitchen cupboards waiting perhaps for shelves of their own. The stair wall is a patchwork of pictures and photographs while the pale walls in the living room are being left for a while until I’m ready to adorn them, or not. Until the melange is pared, one surface needs to remain calm.

And I’ve learned that the oft-quoted adage that you can never have enough storage is wrong. There is no use hiding clutter if it means having a box, basket or extra chest of drawers taking up floor space, and shelves all over the walls. Rather than buy more and more storage, offload trappings.

My many books don’t fit on the ample shelves but I won’t add more shelving; I need to pare them back too. “Chuck ‘em,” says one friend but then the poet who lives next door introduced himself with the words: “I love all your books.”

He had seen them on the windowsill, hiding behind the curtains but not fooling the neighbours, and I muttered something about having to take some to the charity shop. “No,” he cried and when I went to his house it was the same, a wall of books, and I loved it.

One person’s clutter is another’s treasure. What makes you feel at home is what matters. I’m taking my time and surrounding myself with things that have meaning and integrity; industrial, mass-produced, hand-made and printed they show what they are. The fireplace that came with the house wouldn’t even get past the style Garda – it is a mediocre, beige-tiled affair but it is integral to the building.

Of course, lovely people are better than things – this is not about the joy of having everything the way you want it. There's a pleasure in sharing chattels and ideas, and even compromising with the right person. But while I'm in this phase it's been a revelation as to how at one you feel with yourself when everything around you has meaning and, as the Danes would have it, hygge (a sort of huggy cosiness).

A friend who had suggested I go the contemporary designer route visited last week and said: “It’s lovely, it’s you.”