My Imaginary Grown Up Home
It has a garden with a meadow and a treehouse.
The walls are lined with professionally framed artwork and family photos.
It has an entrance with space for wellies and bikes and soggy raincoats.
It has floorboards in the kitchen and a space for a shed/studio out back.
It has more than one toilet.
I do not know when I will inhabit this hazy grown up home, if ever. It is a mirage I mentally wander towards whilst I fold laundry and watch our family photos slipping in their frames.
‘I’ll get that professionally framed when we live in The Grown Up House’.
‘I’ll sand that down and get the coffee marks off when we move.’
‘I’ll replace the sofa when we have a bigger room to put it in.’
Even after writing an entire guide on how to embrace the space you’re in, wherever it may be, I still find myself falling into these thoughts.
This is our home, here, now. I love it and enjoy it every day (I also curse it and often want to rip the cupboard door off its hinges when I can’t get the vacuum out, but I try not to dwell).
I am grateful for this home that keeps us sheltered and safe, and yet I still sometimes find myself wandering through the daydream door towards the house with the meadow and the two toilets.
This is where the hung photos on the gallery wall deserve to be framed professionally and where the wooden sideboard should be protected with coasters.
Right here, right now, this is where I love to be.
Where our eldest learned to talk and where our youngest was born.
Where I started my business seven years ago.
Where we have replaced five kitchen rugs, two of them during the lockdowns.
Whether we stay here for the remainder of our lives or we do end up finding a new home, I would like to know I infused as much love and care into this space as the one that exists in my fantasy grown up life. Also, who am I kidding, I am a grown up now.
It feels similar to thinking you’ll do the fun stuff, wear the perfect dress, appear in the photos, when you lose ten pounds.
The moment is now, the place is here.
This is everything I write about, and yet I still sometimes need to call myself back onto the dance floor in real time.
I’m sharing this as a reminder, both to myself and to you: do what you can with what you have.
It’s how I approach every aspect of my life: work, creativity, physically, home-wise, finances.
Because once you embrace the process, the joy and the genius is often found when you are met with limitations.
It’s satisfying, fulfilling and you will often impress yourself and applaud yourself for your genius ideas and lateral thinking.
So I’m taking my own advice, I’m recommitting to our home. I’m reminding myself of the guides I have outlined in Tell the Story of Your Home for how to refine our story, and how to find the golden thread.
This is my grown up life and this is the thread I am spinning.
Meadow or no meadow.
Java x
P.s: If you’d like to join me in committing to telling the story of the home you’re in, I have recently added two new chapters and new video content.
Thanks for this! Deeply identify with never getting round to proper framing 😂 and the sanding that we are also putting off ….
This post reminded me of a book by Deborah Levy called Real Estate - it was a while ago that I read it, it’s one of her autobiographical series. I loved how she wrote about these imaginary houses that we project into the future and alongside that the spaces she’s actually living in / passing through.
This: "...the joy and the genius is often found when you are met with limitations." was the stand out thought of another rich read. I am a great believer in true creativity thriving inside boundaries and when you find the answer, the path the idea or whatever it is, the joy is limitless. And that is thanks to the limitations. I loved this post Java - the idea that we put off life like we put off wearing our best clothes - saving them for best when the truth is NOW is 'best'. I am so pleased you have come to that realisation now - I am thirty years older than you and only just got there. hey ho. better late....also, just to say, your house always reminds me of a painting - no particular painting, or a story book - abundant. It also reminds me of Alfie's house (Shirley Hughes) - which is the sort of house I wanted mine to be when bringing up the kids. Comfortable, colourful, full of flowers and toys and stuff. Bugger the minimalism.