“A house is made of walls & beams; a home is built with love & dreams.” — Unknown
Ever since I moved into this apartment, I’ve never felt like I could fully, completely reside here. In the back of my mind, I’ve always seen this place as temporary, thus making is seem like any additional work into making it feel more like home would be pointless. It wasn’t until I boldly offered my apartment to house our “Book Club” meeting this Sunday that I realized how disconnected & ashamed of it I felt. & because of those feelings, I’ve spent the last few weeks heavily engrossed (almost obsessively so) in improving & beautifying my apartment.
I think that offering to host the “Book Club” meeting here — in spite of it scaring the shit out of me — was the best idea I ever had. It finally gave me a tangible reason to acknowledge my neglectfulness regarding my apartment & the ill feelings I have towards it. I’ve always avoided inviting people to our place, for the simple reason that I felt like it didn’t reflect who we were as a couple; that it wasn’t an accurate depiction of our style or our standards. In my mind it was just a building we lived & slept in; nothing exciting about it. So you can understand how my offering to have the “Book Club” meeting here was no ordinary suggestion. & after I offered, I pretty much thought, Ev`Yan, what the fuck did you just do?? & proceeded to freak out for the next few days.
In all fairness, our apartment wasn’t ever atrocious. It’s not like we had mismatched furniture, wretched wall coloring, or thick layers of dust practically absorbing into non-porous items that have never been out of boxes. I’ve always been meticulously neat & organized, & living in filth — dust, dirt, disarray of any kind — has never been an option for me. So it wasn’t that. No, my aversion to our apartment had everything to do with the seemingly maddening normalcy & boringness of it. For instance, we purchased a brown secondhand couch for $30, only because we had only one small table chair to sit on at the time. We bought our bookshelves only because we needed a place to house our ever-growing collection of literature. We invested in a coffee table for one reason only & that was to have a place to eat our meals (we do not have a dining table). Nothing in our apartment was purchased because we desperately wanted it; & nothing was purchased because it fit within a specific vision of what we wanted our home to look like. We purchased nearly all of the furniture in our apartment because we needed it, & desperately. We needed sustenance. We needed needed a simple place to unwind. We had no frills, no splurges, no covets. Everything was bought strictly for professional usage; there was nothing whimsical or creative about it.
Actually… that’s not altogether true. As time went on — & after having moved out of our two-car-garage-converted-into-a-studio-apartment apartment — we started to stretch our creative wings & get a little inspired… but only in quick spurts. We’ve bought several pieces of furniture out of sheer desire & gluttony, & those pieces are gorgeous, timeless, & brand new. So I guess I’m not being completely fair in my & Jonathan’s efforts to create a home for ourselves. We really did the best we could with what little we had to work with — both with money & with inspiration. I’m being particularly hard on myself because, as I said before, this place has never felt like home for me. Matter of fact, no place has ever felt like home to me, & trying to come to grips with that only resulted in my having to choke back tears in remembrance of my childhood home that I was seemingly thrust out of on a whim.
But that’s another story entirely.
For the last several weeks, I’ve been forced into reconciling with my irrational abhorrence to our apartment by taking a giant step back & really seeing what we’ve got. & after seeing what we’ve got — which is a lot more than most people have, I humbly realized — I started to envision ways I could transform the look of our place by doing little things to make it better. Not with extra furniture (we have quite enough of that!), but with passion, imagination, & a willingness to see our apartment in a positive light for a change.
& so… I got to work. I somehow found myself on Apartment Therapy, going through their home hacks file, seeing if I could do anything simple to give our place a quick face lift. (& can I just say that I have never been on home improvement websites looking for, well, improvement? I’m more likely to watch Judge Judy than to venture toward any form of house renovation & DIY beautification. So having been utterly entranced by Apartment Therapy, having spent almost 2 hours browsing the site & letting my creativity take root was a pretty big deal for me. I just needed to point that out.)
Not long after I entered the site, I found this tutorial, which showed me how to turn our lumpy, secondhand couch into a seemingly brand new & polished one. In that moment, the Heaven’s opened up & 10,000 angels began to sing choruses of Hallelujah! & I started to feel a little weepy at the prospect of giving this old couch a second chance. Because I really, REALLY hated our couch; so much so, that I would pester Jonathan weekly about buying a brand new one (& thankfully, he never relented). So I did it myself, & having implemented this simple adjustment to our couch made all the difference in the world. I actually want to sit on our couch now. It’s quite amazing.
A funny thing happened after successfully completing that simple DIY project: I felt a surge of energetic enthusiasm that provoked me to do more wonderful things to our place. & one by one, little by little, everything else fell into place. One inspiration led to another, & before I knew it, I had completely revamped our apartment (on a dime, mind you!) in such a way that I beam from ear to ear upon walking into it. All it needed was a little love & attention.
It’s truly amazing what new couch covers & unique accent pieces will do to a place. It’s also amazing what a little conscious organizing & redesigning can accomplish. (See the difference for yourself by seeing what it looked like a few weeks ago or by watching this even older video touring our apartment.) There is a depth & intrigue to our apartment that wasn’t there before. It radiates warmth & personality & tranquility. It finally expresses the elegance & diversity of my & Jonathan’s tastes without trying. It might not look like an immaculate, artistic sanctuary in an Ikea catalog, but it’s my home.
There’s still a lot of things I’d like to do while in this apartment. I’d like to paint a few more pictures & put more art on the walls. I’d like to get a rug, since our place is made up of hardwood flooring. I’d like to buy more books so that our bookshelves don’t look so bare. I’d like to do some major work in our bedroom especially, because that is one room that has truly suffered during our neglectfulness. Amazingly, though, I am perfectly satisfied with the look & feel of our apartment currently. For the first time in my adult life, I am actually quite proud of it.
What a stunning feeling it is to come home from running errands & feel the entire Universe boom “Welcome Home” as you enter your private dwelling. What’s even more stunning is being able to enjoy life more fully based on those feelings of sheer, unadulterated comfort & security.