The home is supposed to be where the heart is but to many of us it is not. Why? It’s because we don’t spend a lot of time at home. Whenever we detach ourselves from spaces we live in, those spaces die. Yes. They become dead spaces that do not allow our hearts to linger.
Most of us assume that when we own the house then we now have a home but that is an agrarian mentality where you needed land to survive, as it was a factor of production today, we carry ours on our necks.
Which reminds me of the song “Papa was a Rolling Stone” by the Temptations with the lyrics “wherever he laid his hat was his home” which should tell us that we make our homes where we are and should not postpone it for later.
Crucial moments
You might not spend a lot of waking time in your home but it is where you spend those most crucial moments, which determine your waking day, before you fall asleep and as soon as you wake up.
If you come home all stressed out, flop into that well-worn chair only to look across at the same old curtains that have been draped over the windows for the past five (5) years, you are most likely to feel much worse.
Too many of us spend tens of thousands on a single set of drapes instead of on a few sets of well-priced drapes of different patterns. Alternatively you can opt to rotate the same sets around the rooms, which can be as effective as repainting the walls.
Chama model
If we are to apply the chama (a women’s social group with a mild financial component) model here, you can buy a number of full roles of draping at wholesale price then share it amongst the members. Each of the members is then free to have theirs sewn into single pattern curtains, mixed pattern curtains, duvet covers, bed covers or scatter pillow covers so as to avoid your houses looking like those of twins.
Recently my wife replaced the linings and curtains with something she called sheer curtains, in my head
curtains were supposed to cut out light totally, even though we close them when it is dark outside, or to prevent prying eyes, which made me feel uncomfortable at first.
It is only after a few days of sitting opposite the sheer curtains that I realised their practicality, they worked perfectly during the day allowing enough light in and they prevented dust but did not stop prying eyes from looking into the house. The latter was not important because our sitting room faces into a private garden; this reflects how we do not question why we do what we do.
Odourless and scented paints
Today, with fast drying, water based and odourless paints, but there are now scented ones, you can have your entire house repainted in less than a day and ready for habitation. The price of paint has also dropped and with the added advantage of having colour-mixing stations within many of our supermarkets there is no logical reason not to repaint that wall.
Last but not the least, you can bring your interiors back to life by just moving furniture around; rotating your bed will give you a new wall/window to wake up to providing a new perspective to your live.
I appreciate that some of us have squeezed 6 x 9 beds into 9 x 10 rooms, which means rotation is out of the question, which is a topic for another time.
Take time to make those little changes, many of which have no cost implication, in your homes and bring them back to life and therefore giving you new perspective on the day.
