Rooms for Living

With the basement renos inching closer to completion, the rest of our house is settling back into itself. Any sort of construction is always disruptive, but especially in a small house where storage space is at a premium. Especially when the space undergoing construction used to be the main large storage area available for dumping, well, all the flotsam and jetsam of life. We cleared out a LOT of things, and now that the basement is usable again, all of the things I’ve been saving up to decorate it with are finally in their rightful place. And the rest of the house can breathe again.

As I’ve been going through rooms, clearing out clutter and all the various pieces destined for the basement, I’ve fallen in love all over again with the house. This happens with some regularity. You live in a space and, after a while, you stop seeing it; it just becomes something you take for granted. And then, one day, bam! You see it again with fresh eyes. It’s wonderful! Or full of potential! Or both! I’m a big fan of periodic “refreshes” of our living space. As with everything else in life, the needs for your living space change over time because people – individually and as groups – grow and evolve. Their patterns of living change.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the solution for this is to move to a new house. My husband and I don’t subscribe to it; when we moved into our house – a modest suburban “starter home” by the standards of our city – we very quickly decided that we would not move again if we could help it. The location is great for our family, our housing costs easily manageable, and I never have to think about how to transport 1,800+ books. Instead of moving, we have worked steadily over the last 13 years to “upgrade” our house to suit our changing needs and our aesthetic aspirations. It is a constant work in progress. We’ve had to make peace with that – there will always be a next project, and another, and another. Some of them are functionally necessary (furnaces and roofs need replacing), some are practical (adding shelving for 1,800+ books), some are aesthetic, and some are a combination of all three. The fact that my husband is basically a one-man construction company, who can pretty much build a house from top to bottom, is incredibly helpful. I mean, that’s an understatement. I recognize how lucky we are to have his skills. It does mean that every major project takes, on average, a couple of years to complete because a full-time job, hands-on parenting, and life in general don’t leave a lot of spare time for renos. That’s something else we’ve had to make peace with. Life is not HGTV.

Our house has changed a lot over the last decade, and it will continue to do so. I try to take photos of it at various stages to record its evolution. It’s kinda like our “baby”, you know? It’s nice to be able to look back and see how far we’ve come on.

Take the living room, for example.  Here was its very first iteration:

We had just moved in; two almost-30 year olds, about to get married, on a teeny budget. That leather couch was the most “grown up” piece of furniture we owned at the time. Everything else came from our respective college-era apartments. I don’t even remember what our aesthetic tastes might have been at the time, and you certainly can’t tell what they were from this set-up. I’m glad we didn’t rush out and buy a bunch of new furniture and things to fill up this space, though. I’m certain that whatever we might have picked then wouldn’t be something we would still love now. It’s taken us years of living together to develop our collective ideas about interior design (my husband trained as an architect so I’m sure he had a more robust sense of design that I did at the beginning). Taste and personal style – in interior design as much as fashion – take years to mature. At 30, I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to envision our living room as it looks today, and I would have been amazed to know that this was something we could achieve.

This brings up another important lesson I’ve learned. When I was younger, I was often bowled over by the houses of older acquaintances. They displayed a level of style that I believed could only be achieved by spending pots and pots of money. But I was wrong. You don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of money all at once to create a beautiful space; you just need time. A good part of the beauty of many of those interiors I admired was derived from the fact that they were collected and curated – perfected, if you will – over many years. If I could tell my younger self anything on this topic, it would be not to worry or be too impatient. The process of assembling one’s dream house, piece by piece, is inextricably part of the reason why it’s one’s dream house. Beauty and meaningfulness derive from the process as much as the individual elements.

One last thought. A few weeks ago, I saw an IG post from the Washington Post referencing a study that had concluded, and I quote, that “HGTV is making our homes boring and us sad.” The gist was that watching home renovation media, like HGTV (and I would add, social media like Instagram), leads homeowners to decorate for the masses and not for their own happiness. I didn’t look into the details of the study, but at a gut level, I agree with this. I call it the flattening of viewpoint – people are exposed to a specific aesthetic over and over and seek to replicate it, which reinforces the predominance of that aesthetic and drives out diversity and individuality. Indirectly, this also ties back to what I was talking about earlier – the desire I used to have (which I think is common, especially in younger folks) to want to have a “nice” house instantly. Being presented with a socially-reinforced formula for what a “nice” house looks like feeds the belief that it can be achievable with one click or two clicks. And what’s lost when we adopt that mentality is the whole process of creating meaning and beauty through the expression of one’s ever-evolving viewpoint.

Next week, I can’t wait to talk about our OG flex space (long before the basement): the family/bonus/library room.