Getting a city apartment painted is a trial for several reasons. The rent laws encourage city-dwellers to stay put; over the years our possessions accumulate unwinnowed. The crampitude of our island encourages ingenious packing and storing; nuts in a chipmunk burrow are not more carefully stowed away. So, when the decorator’s white starts ripening to subway gray and the time comes to apply another coat, the task of readying the apartment for the painter and then readying it, after he is done, for habitation becomes formidable.

My wife and I considered the battle space: two bedrooms (one, her office); two baths; kitchen; and an S-shaped dining room/living room/hallway. We divided these spaces into ten areas, and arranged with a painter to attack them one by one on weekends. Mid-week we took things apart, a tornado of rearranging; on the days of rest he worked; Sunday evening we put everything madly back, and then, for two months, the process began again.

The building we live in dates from the Kennedy administration; we have been living here since Carter. The biggest change over that time has been the computer age. The home office, supposed Nirvana of convenience, has brought, not only the inconvenience of home maintenance, but nests of wires that connect screens, keyboards, mouses, printers, faxes, and routers to hard drives, outlets, and one another. Move a desk an inch and it’s like the death of Laocoön and his sons back there. I suppose the youngsters have everything in their handhelds, and soon enough the continent will be a hot spot, from South Beach to Palin-land. But those solutions are not yet ours. Unplugging and plugging all this took the guile of Ariadne. The kitchen, by contrast, is the bastion of old technology, but no easier for that. Thank Heaven we could not move the stove, a built-in Royal Rose with a blue and white spotted-metal interior; I am sure it could not be replaced if damaged. The walls are festooned with the implements our grandmothers knew: knives, choppers, pans, spiders, colanders, ladles, corkscrews, bottle-openers, cherry-pitters, honey-drippers, apple-corers, ice-cream scoops. Add a salad spinner, a microwave, and a few wooden wine crates for storage and you have a good day’s work.

I have a friend, a serious collector of paintings and prints, who calls his apartment a museum. He could actually invite young ladies to come up and look at his etchings, except that he’s married. We are not such aesthetes, but we do like objects that remind us where we have been. The wooden floors, scuffed from use and warped from leaks, are covered with the rugs. The most memorable salesman was a gloomy Indian who flipped through his wares almost tragically: “I show you my heart. You go to villages now, is finished — finished! I show you my heart.” The best (from the seller’s point of view) was a Moroccan who ran into us in the souk the day after we had made a purchase. The warmth of his greeting told us how badly we had been taken. Rugs creep up the walls, and even onto the ceiling. But walls and flat surfaces are mostly for objects. Certain themes and body parts repeat. The corner of masks has a jaguar, a demon, a bat, and a Bedouin woman’s veil (would we display a shackle?). The shelf of hands has a Buddha’s hand, a saint’s hand, a cement hand from a tomb, glove molds, and a mold of the hand of a preemie, made by the pediatrician who saved its brand-new life.

More numerous and more troublesome are the things, the odds and ends, the rubble of knick-knacks and dust catchers. Item: a small plastic desk refrigerator. Everything in it is useful; the eggs on the inside door are erasers, the vegetables in the vegetable bin are tiny pens. Item: a green wooden canoe, 20 inches long, with two oars. Item: a snow globe showing the faces of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Shake it, and there is heavy weather. Item: an ivory opium container, half an inch deep, one and a half inches across, with ivory twist cap (empty). Item: my wife’s guitar, a Gibson, snapped in its case. For years she sang me the best tracks on Joan Baez’s first album; when I first heard the original, it was with a jolt, the aural equivalent of double vision. Item: a 12 oz. jar filled with old coins. Now we’re talking! French ladies, buff Italian demigods, Canadian beavers, British sovereigns. Bearded George V, with all his Latin titles: DEI GRA:BRITT:OMN:REX FID:DEF:IND:IMP: Eat your heart out, Hitler.

There is also, and removing it is one of the points of the exercise, a lot of dirt. The panels of the heater/air conditioners, covered with fur; salamanders of dust behind the sofas; the nameless grit under chair cushions — only the overhaul of a move, or failing that a paint job, will bring it all to light, and banish it to the garbage chute. Out with the dirt go the possessions that have finally overstayed their welcome. The four-inch-long leather quiver from Brattleboro, Vt., filled with arrows, will have to find some tiny brave elsewhere. The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc must seek a reader young enough not to reject its bullying nonsense. The COLIN POWELL FOR PRESIDENT 1996 button — any takers? I didn’t think so.

Of course it is stressful. One mate (that would be me) undoes and redoes the other’s books, but gets them all out of order. Don’t try that again, pal. Another mate (that would be her) plugs a lamp cord in behind her unwitting partner, six inches off the floor. Islam’s divorce practices seem momentarily attractive. The turmoil also raises the question, how many more times? We last painted 20 years ago; 20 years from now we will be in our seventies and eighties. That will be time for a smaller place, if not Florida; then will come the smallest place. To rearrange is to live.