Married Life: Don’t put up with bad furniture if you value domestic happines

When we moved into our new apartment, I struggled to make the big dining set fit … until finally I realised that I could simply get rid of whatever didn't work.

For our first year of marriage, Mr T and I lived in a furnished, one-bedroom apartment off Muroor Road. It was ideal. We didn’t have to concern ourselves with furnishing our first home from scratch – instead we spent money on our wedding, our honeymoon and our appliances.

Once that first year was over and we were ready to move to a three-bedroom apartment, we began buying furniture with gusto. It was a first for the both of us and we embraced the experience wholeheartedly. Looking back, I am slightly embarrassed at the comical joy we derived out of shopping for a couch.

Fast forward a few years, and I was beginning to hate the furniture we had saddled ourselves with. It was just right in our roomy, three-bedroom on Airport Road – but it felt bulky and out of place in our compact two-bedroom on the 65th floor of a tower on Reem Island, where we’ve been living these past three years.

The couches blocked the light from our floor-to-ceiling windows. The side tables felt outdated and too high-maintenance. And our dining table? Large, round and glass-topped on a wooden pedestal, it was my nemesis.

Changing things around was impossible – the dining set took up two-thirds of the space, and I spent every morning and every evening polishing away all the fingerprints on the glass. I hated it. I hated eating on it, I hated letting Baby A colour or paint on it. The dining chairs didn’t even fit all the way around it and had to be placed elsewhere in our cluttered apartment.

And then one day, I decided I’d had enough. Happiness is something you actively pursue, whether through individual moments that you create and cherish as memories of joy, or by surrounding yourself with whatever it is that provides you with comfort and peace.

I wanted that dining table out, to let the happiness in. It might sound silly, but when you consider how short life is, how important it is to find contentment in your own home, how pointless it is to surround yourself with people or things that vex you rather than bring you happiness, it all begins to make sense.

I’ve since sold that dining-room set and purchased something small and simple and rustic and perfectly right for our little family and our comfy, cosy living room. Mr T, Baby A and I can often be found around our new wood-topped table with the metal base, eating, colouring, playing, chatting, working.

And cleaning it is a dream – there are no fingerprints on it anywhere.

Having the freedom to make our own choices in things such as our home decor – even as our needs and tastes change with the passing of the years – must be part of what growing up is all about. Mr T and I have nothing to prove to anyone but ourselves, and once we accepted that, and realised we no longer had to live with furniture that didn’t suit us, our family or our needs – it all became so simple.

Hala Khalaf is a freelance journalist based in Abu ­Dhabi