How to Create a Comfortable Home (Without Buying Anything New)

Several years ago my boyfriend and I attended the Hay Literary Festival, and in an unusual fit of nostalgia I suggested that we drive to the village in which I grew up, about 45 minutes. We toured the monuments - my grandparents' house, where I was born, the primary school I attended - and, of course, my childhood home, the little piece of terrace I shared with my two older brothers and my father, after my mother left for a small apartment about a mile away.

Dan and I had been out for no more than A minute or two when the door opened and an older couple asked if they could help. I told them I grew up in their house and they immediately invited us inside for tea. I have tears in my eyes every time I think of them, not only because their home - now bright, lovingly decorated and happy - holds so many unusual memories for me, but also because the owners were so generous and warm that I felt more at home than myself. had when I could rightly call this home my own. As they showed us around, sharing all the work they had done over the past 30+ years, the conversation turned to how they had come to buy the place.

They told us that sometime after my family left, a man had moved in – an older Englishman whose wife had left him. He had apparently become so depressed that he had developed a drinking problem and had become what we would now call a hoarder. There had been vermin, they told me. Litter throughout the house. Damp, musty. Every room was full of bric-a-brac – old newspapers, broken furniture, dirty carpets, sacks and sacks of garbage. They were happy, they told me, that I never had to see my old home – the home we all loved – in such misery. It was a very deplorable situation. I nodded and smiled, because I had too much pride and too much shame to tell them - and my new boyfriend - that the Englishman was my father and that the house sounded the same as when we left her.

I tell this story because, as sad as it made me in some ways, that day also showed me how the A home's entire soul can be transplanted with proper cleaning, organizational care and a few cherished, meaningful possessions. Home, for me, was never just a place to eat, sleep and watch TV. Don't get me wrong - I can think of few things I'd rather do, but to fully enjoy it, I have to pay attention to the details first.

Something as simple as repositioning your lighting or even just changing your bulbs can almost imperceptibly change the mood of a room. The methodical, almost insane work of emptying the freezer or the kitchen shit drawer can be a vivid metaphor for processing your own cluttered thoughts and feelings. Home improvement is much more than a commuting activity because, unlike cycling on social media, it actually takes us to a place where we would like to be: a quiet sanctuary to belong to.

Due to the unpredictable and precarious nature of my housing situation once I left home at almost 15 and moved to London, I am undeniably obsessed by my house, which is the most important thing in my life after the people I love. While I was eager to run away as a child, my home is now the first place I run to in a crisis. I admit it, I fetishize domesticity. Not in a frantic way of cushion stuffing, door knocker polishing, doorstep scrubbing, but in the way that there's nowhere in the world I'd rather be than on my own sofa or my lit.

What the generous, warm and happy owners of my childhood home demonstrated that day is that the most beautiful homes are not made with money, they are made with love, and that no amount of money can hide an unhappy one.< /p>

Home is where I feel safest, most comfortable, happiest and most like me. You can be the same. Our homes give us so much, I think taking care of them is the least we can try to do in return. Here's how I did it…

How to make a home comfortable (without buying anything new)