are you diggin’ your digs?
Do you love your house? Do you ever look around your place and think I can’t believe I get to live here? Or are you feeling like I can’t believe I have to live here? Or maybe you are somewhere in between. What makes us love our spaces? Usually our love affair with a property depends on location, size, function and aesthetic.
If you bought your house during the last 5 plus years, you may have feelings about your home that reflect on the sellers’ market we’ve been facing. If you offered on multiple properties, you may be super grateful that you have a roof over your head and finally won a place of your own. Or, you may feel like the market forced your hand, and you bought something that was available rather than something that made your heart sing.
The location of your home is a big deal. You might like the house but hate your commute which starts to bleed into not liking your house so much. You might be too near something undesirable or too far from family. Do you like your lot and your yard? You can fix up the basement, but moving your house to a new spot is, well – extremely tricky!
Maybe buying what you could afford left you with a decent-sized mortgage but not a lot of square footage. When you feel jammed into a space, you can feel uncomfortable. And if you or someone else under your roof has a lot of clutter, you might feel extremely squished. The opposite can be true as well. The nest has emptied, you miss your kids, and the house feels overwhelmingly large, empty, and sad.
Functionality can be a bit of a mystery initially. When looking at a beautifully staged property or a vacant house, we can’t always envision how our lives will operate in the space. Will shoes and backpacks constantly be blocking the doorway? Will dirty clothes be spilling out of the laundry closet all over the kitchen table? When friends come for dinner and stand around your kitchen, can you still serve up the charcuterie? Often function can be improved with some ingenuity and thought – and probably money. Sometimes a little fix reaps major benefits, but other times a large fix is in order. Fixing issues can be worth the time and investment because better function equals better quality of life.
When choosing a new house, we often notice the cosmetic choices first – the shiny things – or the not-so-shiny things. Paint colors and carpets, countertops and surfaces all play a part in helping us love our homes. Maybe you don’t like your home because you never got around to repainting your bedroom. It’s still the icky brown you inherited from the previous owner. That’s on you, my friend. But I’ve been there, too. I hated the color of my room, but I never spent a weekend to repaint. Taking a little step to improve the asthetic of your home can be super rewarding.
If you’re not loving your place, maybe you need the home-owners’ serenity prayer: Grant me the courage to paint and repair the stuff I should, the serenity to overlook the junk in my neighbor’s yard, and the wisdom to know when to call my realtor.