Create a Home You Love

What if creating your dream home doesn’t have to look like moving to a new address, building a new house or spending thousands of dollars on renovations? What if you could create a home you love, today, right where you are?!

When you think of the word “home”, what do you picture?

For a long time when I thought of the perfect home I pictured a new, beautifully furnished house with modern home decor and a perfectly manicured yard. But I’m slowly learning that perhaps, maybe, a beautiful home actually has little to do with the address or building itself!

A mansion on a hillside with a white picket fence is no more a home than a small mobile home in the middle of town. You may live in an apartment, a double wide trailer, a shop or maybe even a camper. You may not even own the place you live in. Regardless of the circumstances, you can start creating your dream home, today!

what makes a home?

So if a home isn’t all about rooms and walls, furniture and perfect paint colors, what is it? While these things definitely play a role, they certainly aren’t all that make up a home. Not by a long shot.

A home is a place of refuge, a warm and safe shelter from the outside world. It’s a place for teaching, loving and serving. It’s a place for making memories, building relationships and hospitality. A place of order and peace.

Let’s explore some of the things that make up a home and some things you can do to start creating a home you love today!

1. Contentment

I believe the first step in this dream-home-making process is contentment. This sounds easy! But it’s not. At least it hasn’t been for me. But the Bible talks about contentment as being a great gain, and I believe it’s true. I believe if we prayerfully ask for this every day, God will grant us contentment.

In this age that we live in, it can be hard not to compare. We see pictures on social media nearly every day of other peoples’ beautiful homes, and we compare and become discontent with our own homes. Or we might have boards on our Pinterest accounts with pictures of beautiful homes we dream of living in someday. Then we spend our days dreaming of that “someday” home and never learn to appreciate the one we live in today.

Don’t get me wrong, Pinterest and other social media platforms can be a great place to go to for inspiration! But it can also become a place that can cause us to become really discontent with what we have. I’ve been there too many times to count.

Being discontent about something and being motivated to change it is a good thing, if you can change it! But a lot of the things about our home can’t be changed.

Look around your home today and choose to be content with the things you can’t change right now.

2. Atmosphere

Now this is something we can change!
The atmosphere of our home starts with us as homemakers. Our moods and attitudes set the tone for our homes, for better or for worse.

You’ve probably heard the old saying, “if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” I’ve found this to be true on more occasions than I’d like to admit. If I have a bad day and feel like everything is going wrong, pretty soon the whole atmosphere in the home is full of tension. The kids sense it, my husband senses it and, therefore, anyone who enters the home senses it.

While bad days are inevitable, there are some steps we can take to set the tones for our home. Here’s a few things that have helped me!

Get up before your family. Having at least 20 minutes of time to yourself each morning can be so life giving! Use those quiet moments to prepare your heart and mind for the day. I know for mothers this isn’t possible in every stage of life but if life allows and you can get into the habit, I can assure you, you won’t want to miss those precious moments!

Not a morning person? Try creating a morning routine that excites you! I love lighting a candle or small lamp by a cozy chair. Then I curl up with a blanket and hot coffee, and read. This prepares my heart and mind for the day and creates a warm and relaxing atmosphere.

Feed your soul. In the time you have alone each morning, or whenever you get an extra moment throughout the day, feed your soul. Leave your phone in another room and spend time in the Word or in prayer. If our souls are fed, it will be much easier to get through the day without losing our patience or getting frustrated.

Sights and Sounds. Take time throughout your day or week to light a candle, and turn on some soft music. Put a cloth on your table vase of flowers or tray of fresh fruit. It’s really amazing just how much simple actions like this improve the atmosphere of our homes!

3. A Safe Place

We want our homes to be a safe place for our families to feel comfortable and at ease. The home is supposed to be a place where we can let down our guards and kick up our feet. A place where we feel loved and welcome. A place we want to come back to time and time again.

I love going back to the home I grew up in. Even though its been years since I left, that home will always be a part of me. A lot of things have changed in my parents home but I still get the same feelings of love and security when I step in to those walls. I hope my children feel the same way about our home someday!

How we treat the people in our homes is key on building security and creating peace. Here’s a list of a few things we can do to to make our homes a safe place.

• Accept one another
• Greet one another with hugs and kisses
• Serve one another
• Encourage and build up one another
• Fervently love one another
• Allow your people to make messes and mistakes

4. A place of Beauty

As a Christian, I know that my home here on earth is very temporal. But I also know that my eternal, heavenly home is a place of unimaginable beauty and splendor. Our creator made us with eyes to appreciate beauty. Even though my earthly home will never compare to the beauty in heaven, I do think its important to create some beauty in our homes.

It can be so tempting to keep up our homes with all the trends but, yikes! It changes nearly every day! And home decor, and furniture is not cheap these days. Keeping up with it all is nearly a full time job. But creating beauty in our homes doesn’t have to involve breaking the bank. Here’s a few ways to create beauty on a budget.

Functional Decor. I love having decor that serves a purpose. Pretty dishes can be used for special occasions and also as decor! Things like curtains, lamps, cozy rugs and throws all serve a purpose other than providing beauty. In our home, we use our musical instruments as decor. A few years back I bought a beautiful, vintage upright piano. I love playing it, but it’s also a beautiful piece of decor in our living room! My husband’s acoustic guitars are also used as decor!

Thrifted beauty.You can thrift beautiful decor and furniture almost anywhere these days! I’ve found so many beautiful pieces of furniture and decor at my local thrift store and I love incorporating them into our home. It’s cheap and that way, when I get tired of it, I don’t feel guilty bringing it back to where I found it!

Areas of beauty. Not nearly every room in our home is picture worthy. A lot of them are strictly functional! But I do love having a few areas that are beautiful, and I consider them somewhat of a resort. My living room is a place like that. Its a place I like to keep tidy, clean and beautiful. That way when the rest of the house feels like a war zone, I have a place to resort to where I can breathe and is easy on the eyes. Pick a room and make it beautiful!

5. A place of Order and peace

These days there is no shortage of ‘stuff’. I cant believe how intentional I have to be in order that our home doesn’t accumulate a way too much of it!

I once heard someone say that if you constantly find yourself having to declutter your spaces, it’s probably not that you have an organizingproblem but more likely you have a buyingproblem. Gulp. I always considered myself somewhat of a wise spender, but I was constantly finding the need to declutter!

After that I was more conscious while I was out shopping and found out that, yes, I had a bit of a buying problem! I love going to yard sales and thrift stores and getting a good deal! I figured I was saving us a lot of money! But often I was buying little items that we really didn’t need and it filled our home with more clutter.

When my home is full of clutter I also find that my blood pressure higher than normal. Weird. But maybe you’re one of those odd people who can relate with me! It seems like every item in the house has something to say, and my mind gets no peace.

In my opinion, when it comes to stuff, less is more. Minimizing the amount of stuff we have will also minimize the amount of work we have, minimize the amount of stress we have and therefore, bring more peace.

I constantly need the reminder that our children really don’t need a ton of toys to be happy. They need love, discipline and security. No toy can provide that. I try to keep our kids toys to a minimum so that they can independently maintain them.

Well, I hope this post has been an encouragement and inspiration for homemakers to create a home they truly love. What are some things you’ll do today to start creating a home you love? Let me know in the comments below!