There is a version of the house in which people can be invited. In that version the hall is painted, the second bedroom does not contain the drying rack, the sofa has been replaced and the kitchen has the cupboard door that has been off its hinge since spring. Nobody has ever arrived at that version of the house. It exists about eighteen months in the future, permanently, moving at exactly the speed you approach it.

Meanwhile you have not had anybody round since the winter before last, and that is the actual cost. Not the hallway.

What a guest actually registers

Whether there is somewhere to sit. Whether it is warm. Whether they can work out where the lavatory is without asking. Whether anyone seems pleased they came. That is very nearly the entire list, and none of it is on yours.

The specific state of your skirting boards is invisible to everyone who does not live with it. People notice their own houses in forensic detail and other people's houses as an atmosphere. This is not reassurance, it is how attention works — you have a fault register for this building and your guests have never seen the document.

Seating is the one thing worth solving properly

If there is one thing on this list to spend money and thought on, it is this. Not a matching set: enough seats, of different kinds, that a group of adults can all sit down at once without anyone being put on a dining chair dragged in as an afterthought, or on something that creaks.

Solid wooden chairs without arms, a bench that seats two or three, a well-made stool. Check what furniture is rated for before buying — it is printed in the specification and almost nobody looks — and buy the sturdier version, which usually costs a little more and lasts twice as long. A chair nobody has to think about is genuine hospitality and the absence of one is remembered.

Arms on a dining chair are the detail most often got wrong. They look generous and they narrow the seat.

Lower the light, not the standards

A room lit from above by one overhead bulb shows every mark on the wall and flattens everyone in it. Two or three lamps at table height, warm bulbs, main light off — this costs about thirty pounds and does more for a room than a coat of paint.

It is also the single cheapest way to stop seeing the things you cannot currently stop seeing.

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Cook one thing, badly is fine

One dish, made twice before, plus bread and something bought. Not three courses and not anything attempted for the first time with an audience — the failure mode of hosting is not bad food, it is a host who spends the evening in the kitchen and emerges at the end having seen nobody.

Something in the oven for an hour beats anything requiring attention at the point where people are arriving.

The box in the corner

Put it in a bedroom and shut the door. That is a complete and permanent solution, it takes ninety seconds, and nobody has ever opened a closed door in someone else's house and thought less of them for what was behind it.

Say it plainly in the invitation

The house is a mess and I have stopped waiting for it not to be, come Saturday. This works because it is true, because it removes the performance for both of you, and because at least half the people you send it to are sitting in exactly the same situation waiting for the same imaginary future house.

The first one is the hard one. After that it is a habit, and the hallway will get painted eventually, in a year when it stopped being a precondition for having a life.