‘Love grows best in small houses.”
Unknown
Do you ever feel like you just need a change of scenery? Since the shit show that is 2020 started, I’ve been spending an obscene amount of time at home, just as most of the world has. And when you spend that much time at home, you can start to form a mental wish list in your head of the things you’d like to get done around the house. Maybe it has something to do with the non stop loop of HGTV I was bingeing. Anybody with me on this? I really hope so or you can probably stop reading now. But don’t really. Keep going.
Our living room started to feel dark and crowded. And if we were going to have to hunker down here for who only knows how long, it needed to be a warm and bright space. Now I love me some HGTV but I’m more of a Trading Spaces budget than a Chip & Joanna redo. So we donated our old furniture and bought a new couch (on sale) and some paint. And it’s completely transformed the space. It’s brighter, it feels bigger and it’s a space I like to be in. And it didn’t break the bank.
My husband and I work well together on home reno projects. He’s super handy and a hard worker and we just get into the zone when we are working on something for the house. Not saying we don’t argue sometimes because we totally do, but more times than not he’s saying “we make a great team, my love.” And he’s 100% right 💗
Fast forward 6 months and here we are, still spending most of our time at Chez Austin. I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity of doing a combination of working from home and from the office for the past few months. When I work from home, my kids are usually sleeping for most of the day (because teenagers) so I will work from the kitchen table. I have a teeny tiny corner set up as a home office downstairs but it’s downstairs. It’s finished but it’s still downstairs. I found I wasn’t using it much and now that I’m a professional blogger (haha) I needed a change of scenery but didn’t want to break the bank.
So we moved my IKEA desk and filing cabinet from a teeny tiny corner downstairs to a new teeny tiny corner upstairs. I bought a few small items (from Winners, Walmart and Dollarama) to decorate the space and relocated some items that I already had from other areas of the house. And I love it!! It’s bright, it’s warm and it’s a apace that will hopefully inspire creativity.
Our house is small. Our twin boys shared a room up until the last year when one of them moved downstairs (because the dining room I mentioned was previously a 3rd bedroom that previous owners converted). And there have been many times over the 16 years we’ve lived here that I’ve wished for more space, bigger rooms, a more open floor plan (again, thanks a lot, HGTV). But at the end of the day, it’s more space than we need. My grandparents raised 5 kids in a 2 bedroom wartime house. And every few months my Gram would rearrange her furniture. She’d move her couch to a different wall, her end tables to a new corner and change up how the pictures were organized on the “what-not”, as she called it (aka shelf). And it wasn’t until recently that I realized why she did that – Gram probably needed a change of scenery, too 💗
I’ve come to realize it’s not the size of the house; it’s the people in it. It’s not the items you furnish it with; it’s the memories you make under its roof. Home is my happy place; the place we celebrate all our favourite moments, holidays and milestones. It’s the place where we welcome friends and family and make them feel like it’s their home, too. And it’s the place we can retreat to when things outside of these 4 walls get to be a bit too much.
So do what you want to, feel like or are able to do to make your space a happy one. Paint it, move some furniture, pick up some gems at the dollar store. And always be grateful for the people who share that space with you because they are the best way to brighten up any space.
