I’m so pleased to present a guest post about making wherever you live a true home. Diane of New York at Home is something like a home fairy. I have seen her transform small cramped New York apartments to become functional and useful, with very few resources. She understands how people want to feel in their home and designs and organizes from there.
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For most of us, our rent or mortgage is our biggest expenditure each month. In New York City, the average annual rent would be a decent salary elsewhere! Your home has a really important job to do every day—it needs to make your life easier and more enjoyable. Just like any good boss, you need your home to know what you expect and give it tools to succeed.
Your home should be a comfortable place to sleep, dress, and bathe. It should be a place to recharge. You should have a place to cook (warming up leftovers and hot water for tea counts as cooking, by the way). Reminders of your values, people, and experiences make a house a home.
Partners, children, hobbies, pets, working from home, entertaining— add layers to the basics. What activities do you all do together? What do they need? Make a list of how you use your space every week. Look around. How easy is it for your home to support your everyday life?
This simple exercise can produce really surprising results. If you can’t easily get clothing out of your closet because you have too much in the closet, that closet isn’t doing the job it’s supposed to do: make it easy for you to get dressed. If you can’t get to the pot for boiling water to make pasta, your kitchen isn’t doing the job it’s supposed to do.
How did this happen? Over time, we grow and evolve and daydream. We might have spent an hour a day doing yoga or playing Guitar Hero or knitting. We loved every minute of it! But that was 2008. It’s now 2018 and our supplies are covered with dust in a box next to the sofa. Donating gives someone else a chance to enjoy preloved items and gives that space back to you to enjoy for who you are today, not who you were in 2008. It’s normal for this process to bring up a lot of feelings. Remembering that your making room for who you are today and creating an environment that does a better job supporting you right now can make it easier.
What happens when your home is set up to make your daily life easier is that your life feels more manageable. Friction you’ve been living with for so long that you didn’t even notice it anymore is gone. Your life has a calmness to it that you didn’t think would be possible.
Dreaming about a new sofa or dining table is an expensive distraction from free things you can do today to love where you live. It’s free but it’s hard. It’s emotional asking yourself a lot of questions about your identity and where you are in life right now. Looking at your home and asking big existential questions like “what is enough for me?” is powerful. You know yourself better. Knowing yourself better makes it easier to say yes to things that help you continue growing new and wonderful ways. All because you have told your home what you need it to do for you every day.
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