How I made peace with our in-progress house

I’m decorating our house from scratch (including sourcing older pieces), which means our little family is living in an in-progress project. I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough with making peace and thought I’d share.

As I write this, I’m sitting on the borrowed sofa in our living room, a huge chocolate brown sectional. It’s a piece I wouldn’t ever consider buying, but honestly it’s fine. Like the other rooms in our home, most of the furniture in our living room is temporary. We’ll eventually get our own sofa and swap our borrowed coffee table for a cozy ottoman (I’d like to make one).

We’ll add a pair of arm chairs in the blank space across from the sofa.

We’ll find a way to store the vacuum and household miscellany piled up and in clear view under the staircase.

We’ll get roman shades or curtains on the windows and a thick wool rug on the floor (hopefully an old one). We’ll paint the room a color that will soak up the soft, lovely light. My instinct is to stray from the warm white (Farrow and Ball Pointing?) I envision in most other rooms in our house.

Long story short, we have a lot to do in this room (and all of the others). And since moving in, it’s been hard to feel at home in a house where very little of the furniture is ours and where I’ve been constantly brainstorming how to pull the space together. It’s taken up a lot of unproductive mental capacity; I think a lot of us can fall into the trap of obsessing without making much progress. Whether over interiors, clothing, or another area of our lives.

But over the past week, I’ve made a big mental shift. Our house suddenly feels like a home. And although I did get a few small, impactful things (throw pillows for the sofa, a bench in our garden), I think the shift comes from something else.