The Real Problem With Your Home

What Your Home Needs to Be Doing (That It's Not Doing Right Now) 🏡

What does your home need to be doing that it's not doing right now?

That's the question to start with if you want to love your home more. 💛

Most people ask the questions "what do I need to add to my home to love it more?" Then there's the decluttering group that asks "what do I need to remove from my home to love it more?" And there's the general question of "What do I need to change about the way that my home looks to love it more?" 🤔

The problem with all of these questions is that they are using simple tools to solve what tend to be more nuanced problems. It's like holding a hammer and asking "what can I nail to love my home again?" Well, if your home has a bunch of little nails or staples popping out, maybe that question would make sense. But even then, the better question would be "why are these nails and staples popping out?" Nails and staples don't just work their way loose without some root cause. And homes don't just reach that place of needing a meaningful change without some root cause. 🔨 

If you’ve just found my Substack, I write about how to harness the true power of your home so you can feel less frustrated and drained and more restored and fulfilled by it. Today I want to talk about the root cause behind why you don't love your home so you can have a clearer sense of what changes you need to make and which tools you need to use. 🔍

Tools for making a home we love 🧰

First, let's talk about the kinds of tools that we're working with. 

One tool is adding things to your home. Buying a new set of throw pillows for your couch, a lamp for your entryway, a bedspread for your bed- these are all things you can do, but you may not need to do them. And, doing them if you don't need to do them could make you love your home less, especially when you don't do it intentionally. We can't just add things willy nilly here and there the same way we can't go wacking at things with a hammer. The larger goal is getting our needs met. 🎯

Another tool is subtracting things from the home. For a minimalist, sometimes the entire world is made of clutter nails that need to be hit with a decluttering hammer. Don’t get me wrong: decluttering is an extremely helpful tool because we need to actually fit in our space, and the energy of the items surrounding us does affect us. But that still doesn't address issues like how those things got into the home in the first place, why they are affecting you the way that they do, and what purpose you were hoping they would serve when you bought them. 

Blank space does serve a VERY important purpose in our lives, but it doesn't meet all of our needs. It definitely doesn’t comfort you like you hoped that festive throw blanket you just got rid of would when you bought it. And that’s the point here. You had unmet needs that motivated you to buy those things in the first place. Until you know what those needs are and how to get them met, you will keep bringing things into the home that will eventually need to be decluttered. 📦

Then there's the tool of redecorating or remodeling, or just generally changing the way your home looks. This usually involves a combination of adding and subtracting, but it also involves creating a new vision for the home. As a designer, I am absolutely a fan of curation and intention in the home, and I do believe that beauty can have meaning and genuinely comfort us. However, changing the way your home looks needs to be done in the proper context of strategically solving a problem. We need to enjoy our home, but we do not need our home to be aesthetically perfect and on trend. ✨

This will be something I continue to “hammer” home in my articles 🔨🙊… but trends exist to make you feel dissatisfied and buy more. Companies WANT you to want a total home redo. There is SO MUCH MONEY in the home decor and home organization industries. That's just the way the world is, and we have to learn strategies to immunize ourselves against all of this manipulation of our desires so we aren't pulled to get things we don't really need. A home that's beautiful but full of things we don't really need might give us a brief period of excitement, but in the long term, we won't love it the way we want to. 💸

There are a lot more tools than this for improving your home, like getting organized, improving your routines, and addressing the overall energy of your home. No one tool is going to solve all of the issues in your home. Each of them needs to be used intentionally for their purpose. 🛠️

What our home needs to be doing 🏠

We can talk about those tools and their purposes another time, but for today let's stay focused on the original question: What does your home need to be doing that it's not doing right now? The POWER of our home comes from its ability to meet our needs. ⚡

A home isn't just a house or apartment. It's a space that helps meet our needs. 

Our most basic need is survival. We need our home to act like a shelter and protect our body from the outside elements. But the role of the home goes so much further beyond that. There are five categories of needs:

• Survival and Body 🛌

• Security and Stability 🔒

• Connection and Belonging 🤝

• Identity and Esteem 🪞

• Meaning and Growth 🌱

Each of these categories is extremely rich. For example, our body needs warmth and a safe place to sleep, but it also needs comforting sensory input and a design that promotes healthy living. The need for stability means we need order, financial security, healthy boundaries, systems and routines. We need connection, with our intimate partner, our kids, our extended family, our friends, and our community. Our sense of identity is linked to who we have been, who we are becoming, and where we came from, as well as our successes and our failures. We can choose which parts of that our home needs to reflect back to us. That last thing we want is for our home to be reflecting our failures or a limiting belief about ourselves back to us. And then there's the category of meaning and growth. Self-expression, your unique style, creativity, learning, a sense of purpose, moments of contemplation, play, personal development. 🌿

Imagine if your home were supporting all of that! 😍

Well, that's the goal. The goal is to get our home meeting all of our needs in as many ways as possible. The better your home meets your needs, the more you will love it. 💛

These are YOUR needs. 🙋‍♀️

You're unique. You may have the same needs as other people, but how you get them met is unique to you. And, meeting them takes more than just adding something or subtracting something or changing the way it looks. 🧩

Let's say you want your home to make you feel more creative and inspired. First, you will have to figure out what actually does make you feel more creative and inspired. Is it to be surrounded by creativity-inducing things or in a sparse space that feels like a blank canvas? Is it in a tiny room with no distractions or in a large space where you can sprawl out? 🎨

THIS what design is really about. Not applying a one-size-fits-all solution to a problem. Identifying the true needs underneath the problem and customizing a solution to elegantly solve the problem and get the needs met. This means considering what to do and what not to do. 💡

Any problem in your home deserves this level of attention.

Figuring out what your home needs to do 🧭

Maybe you have a home that feels like a nightmare because you're surrounded by too much of the wrong stuff and your home is actively working against you instead of for you. Or maybe you have a home that you have worked really hard on, but something still feels off. You bought the matching rug and throw pillows but it's still not really something that makes you feel proud and content. Even if you think you need to get organized, remember that the problem is nuanced, and it's specific to you. How you like it to look, how you work, how you need it to settle you, how your energy moves. And it's specific to your stage in life, which includes who you're living with. 🏡

So, stop aiming for perfection, and start aiming to get your needs met. That's why we start with the question: what does my home need to be doing that it's not doing right now? 🛑

That question has another question attached to it: What do I need?

• Survival and Body 🛌 — You need your home to give you safe place to land. What does that feel like?

• Security and Stability 🔒 — You need a sense of stability and predictability. How can you create that?

• Connection and Belonging 🤝 — You need your home to promote healthy connection with your loved ones. How can you encourage that?

• Identity and Esteem 🪞 — You need your home to reflect you back to you. Which parts of you do you want to be reminded of?

• Meaning and Growth 🌱 — You need your home to encourage self-expression and personal growth. What's the best way for it to do that?

Yes, I know that this isn't as quick of a dopamine hit as hopping on Amazon for the perfect storage containers. You actually need to tune in to your needs, and you need to tune in to whether or not your home is meeting them. If you don't love your home, you have unmet needs. 🛍️

Can your home meet all of your needs? Of course not. We need things outside of the home. But the point is, there is a LOT that we DO need from our home, and when our home is truly, actually meeting our needs, it makes our lives meaningfully better. And that's the true power of the home. ⚡