Hot Take: You Don't Need to Fix Everything In Your Home

Do you ever just feel tired when you’re scrolling through Pinterest or Instagram gathering ideas for your home? There are so many ideas for how to fix this or improve that or transform these and sometimes it just feels like too much to me.

Don’t get me wrong - I love creating a beautiful home! DIY projects will always be my favorite way to stretch my creativity and there’s nothing I love more than taking a room that doesn’t fit us and giving it a good old fashioned makeover.

But!

What’s even more important than all that is creating a home that feels good. A home that feels like a hug when you walk in the door at the end of a long day. A home that nurtures your family and feels cozy and relaxing at 8 PM on a Tuesday when everyone is settling in for the night.

I’d take a dated, unaesthetic house that checks all of those boxes over a “perfect” home that stresses me out any day of the week.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think that we spend too much time trying to fix our homes and not enough time learning how to love our homes exactly as they are.

I feel a huge difference in my satisfaction in my home when I slow down to find the things I love about it and not just the things I want to change.

Sure, eventually I’d love to deal with the popcorn ceilings and the dated light fixtures and the tile floor.

But for now? I’d much rather focus on the way the light hits the hallway in the midafternoon. Or how cozy the living room feels when the sun goes down. Or the sound of the rain from my office. None of those spaces are even close to “finished”, but that doesn’t stop them from being spaces I love being in.

I recently was working on my back patio and found myself quickly spiraling into “perfection” thinking. In the span of about 10 minutes I mentally added at least 15 different projects to my to-do list that I needed to do before the space was “good enough”. But then, I paused and noticed how cozy it felt in that moment. How, despite the too-low ceiling and dated lights and rough-looking concrete, it’s an incredible space for our family to gather - exactly as it is.

I’ll probably still do the projects. But suddenly, they didn’t feel quite so pressing.

And I’d even argue that some things in your house aren’t even worth “fixing”.

Houses, like people, have quirks. And that’s okay. That off-center doorway or the weird textured walls or the oddly-placed pantry - maybe instead of looking at them as something that detracts from your house, you could look at them as something that adds character.

If something in your home doesn’t actively bother you, make your life more difficult, or affect the joy you feel in your home, then maybe you should let go of the pressure to “fix” it just because you think you should.

The perfect houses we see online don’t always alight with real life. And not only that, chasing a perfect house is exhausting.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and frustrated in your home and thinking you could use a little less pressure and a little more love for your home, here are a few things to try:

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