My Secret Weapon to Decorating My House

Things around my house have been unpacked for months now. Furniture is in place, dishes are organized in the cupboards, clothes placed in a row on hangers.

But then there’s that whole aspect of decorating, which takes a lot more effort than just taking something from a box and finding a home for it. Decorating takes time and thinking about arrangements and tweaking each one until you get it right. It takes effort.

And too often—when there are dishes that need to be done and laundry to be folded and shoes to be put away—the last thing I want to do is try to figure out what I want to put into frames to fill that empty hole on the wall.

Of course, no one says you have to decorate. But, for me, it’s those little touches that make a house feel like a home. So I love decorating—when it’s complete and not necessarily the long, drawn-out process it takes to get there. Sometimes that can be so overwhelming that I just ignore it, put it off until later because there are other things that need to be done.

But I’ve found that one of the surest ways to conquer the apathy toward decorating is pretty simple: Invite people over. Invite people over before everything’s done, even before everything’s out of boxes or organized or looking presentable. Invite folks over, and I’ve discovered that out of nowhere, a desire to unpack and unfurl and hang and hem pops up out of nowhere.

And in just a couple of hours or days, so much more gets accomplished.

That’s what’s happening right now around my house. In a month, we’ll have family down for a week to visit. So the paint cans—which have sat untouched for a couple of months now, since we did our last bout of painting in the bedroom—came out and curtains are getting hung and artwork being made.

It’s not that there’s an expectation that we have to impress them—no, that’s not it at all. Everyone we’ve invited over have been true-blue kindred spirits who could care less whether anything matches.

Instead, I think it has to do with what I mentioned earlier, that decorating makes a house feel like a home to me. And so when those folks come over, I want it to feel like home to them, too.

And so, here I am, painting again…

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