Building a home with heart – the importance of creating a space that fills you up.
This lockdown has brought up so many feelings and ideas about home for me. Staying inside, I have been strict with myself about outside influences. Avoiding the internet as much as possible. Limiting my time on social media. Looking instead to the outdoors, and to what is within me for inspiration. I have given myself permission to pause, and to go within to find what it is I am needing. To stop the comparisons that can happen when I look too much to the outside world. Building a home with heart has also been a major way in which I’ve helped to look after myself.
When I’m able to take away what ‘should be’ is when I’m able to create at my best. Taking away what we feel is the structure and allowing things to flow is the key to creativity. Creating within parameters but having complete freedom within them.
We can try to push things in a certain direction, to twist and bend to get them to fit. Sometimes this works, but it can feel forced and takes the joy out of the ‘doing’. When we allow it to come from the heart, to come naturally, when there is ease and flow is when we get the best results.
It’s what’s inside us that makes it good. It’s like looking at a show home, or a home that is staged for sale. They can be beautiful. Light and airy, filled with beautiful pieces, and yet you can see that no one is living there. The soul is missing, the little things that change it from a house into a home. The quirks, the pieces that tell the stories, the treasures that aren’t perhaps the ‘perfect fit’ but that tell the stories, the histories of the people within. The colour that is chosen for the love of it, rather than its ability to be a blank canvas. Buiding a home with heart is done by adding ourselves into our homes.
And so it should be, right? The purpose of these houses is to encourage people to imagine themselves, their families, their possessions within them. It is allowing us a space on which to project ourselves, opening up an imagining of what could be. Whereas with our homes it is a drawing in. A place to be brought back to ourselves. We want our space to reflect us, our dreams, our memories, our loves.
The putting out and the pulling in. Having a home that pulls you in, fills you up with a sense of yourself. When we take away the ‘what should be’, when we start designing our homes from our hearts rather than by the structures we think need to be there, that is when we are able to create the sanctuaries, the spaces that are purely ours.