Know Your Why – Creating Your Vision For Your Home

When’s the last time you questioned how you use the space in your home?

In this exercise, you’ll go room by room, marking your starting point (what actually happens in that room right now), and then visualizing your destination (what you would like to happen in your home, how you’d like to feel in each room…).  Knowing where you’re starting and where you’d like to go allows us to create a roadmap to get you where you want to go.

This is also a ‘living document’ – when you realize something is missing, or doesn’t feel right, or just needs to change – you simply update the plan.  It’s not written in stone!

 

Creating Your Vision

Supplies for this activity: curiosity, and good ol’ pen and paper.  

(I advise against taking notes on your phone because it’s too easy to get disrupted or side-tracked, and this is a time for concentrated deep thinking.)

If you live with others, feel free to have them do this with you, or separately – or if they’re not interested, just complete the activity on your own.

Step 1: Think about the current reality.

How does this room make you feel?  What happens in this room?  What works well and doesn’t work well?  Be brutally honest, and as complete as possible. 

Step 2: Then imagine what you want in that space.  

How do you (and those who share your space, if applicable) want to feel in this room?  What activities do you wish you could do here that you can’t right now?  What happens here already that you want to keep?  Or tweak?  This is the place to visualize, visualize, visualize – this will be your roadmap as you are decluttering.  

Step 3: Now, compare lists.

Are there activities that you want to do in your home, but in your vision, you haven’t created a space for them?  Consider whether that might require you to rethink some of your vision (maybe you don’t want space for folding laundry, but will still thank yourself later for creating one…).  Or perhaps that’s a message that that activity is no longer of enough importance in your current life (like, you used to love scrapbooking, but now you really just love the idea of having scrapbooked….)

And once again – remember that this is a living document.  As you move through your home and declutter, you’ll find things that you didn’t give a home to; you’ll realize there really isn’t enough space to do an activity here; you’ll realize you actually don’t want to keep supplies for that activity at all….  

Detours, revision – these aren’t problems.  They’re just part of the process.  

 

Why Create a Vision at all?!

First: your vision is your destination.  Without the vision, what’s the point of decluttering?  What’s the endgame?  Why take all this time and effort?  Why does it matter if you have fewer things in your home?

When you know what your destination looks like (even just a vague outline of a feeling you want to have) – THEN you are able to create the steps to get there.  the Roadmap to that final destination.  

Second: your vision can your motivation.  When you’re exhausted, frustrated, feeling like your decluttering is pointless – you can return to this vision. This is your answer to the question of “Why am I decluttering?”  And when your motivation flags (and it will, because we are human), returning to your vision is one tool to try to get some of that energy back.  

Finally: this is a great inventory of everything you need/want to do in your home, wedded to the reality of how much space you actually have.  Adding a touch of reality to your early decluttering may help you let go of things you might have kept “just in case” – because you can see that they are preventing you from achieving your vision.  

 

Pro-tip: Be Willing to Think Outside The Box!

There are NO absolutes when it comes to arranging your home and defining how you want your spaces to work. This is your home.  

Take the dining room, for example.

Just because you may live in a traditional colonial with a beautiful dining room does not mean you need a formal dining room! Maybe you need a first floor office, or a playroom, and you rarely use a dining room anyway. Make that room work for you!

On the other hand, even if you only use that dining room twice a year, if knowing that it’s there and ready for guests just plain makes you happy, don’t feel pressured to convert it just so the room is used more. It’s not “wasted space” when the room is serving a purpose for you!

See how this works? This is your space, so you make the calls.

And you may find that different seasons of life call for different space usages. When we moved into our current house, we moved from a house where we converted the dining room into a home office.  In this house, we were excited to have a dining room, and we used it regularly…until we had our third child, anyway.  Currently, our dining room table is shoved to one side of the room to allow space for a toddler sized table. The credenza has a changing table strapped to it, and the “china” cabinet holds …. diapers and extra baby clothes. That’s where we are in life right now, and it’s not going to win us any home decorating awards, but it works great.  (Yes, I tend toward “practical” in my personal spaces.) 

Want help with this, or any part of your decluttering work?  I love helping clients get started and supporting them as much – or as little – as they want/need in this process.  You can learn more here! 

~ Danie