Starting Anew – Aargh! to Aahh!

People putting together plans for new homes pass through a set of predictable phases.  The first is euphoria:  “Wow, I’m going to have the opportunity to do something new, to create the sort of home for myself and the people I’ll share it with that helps us live the lives we intend to live!”

Euphoria is followed by confusion:  “What should my new home look and feel like?”

And then terror:  “What should my new home look and feel like?”

Creating a new home is an incredibly emotional experience, but one you can manage—and not only live through, but, dare I say it, enjoy.

The first step to developing a new home is to identify the resources that you have at your disposal.  The first thing that comes to mind when people hear the term “resources” is “money,” and money is, as always important, but there are factors beyond the budget that need to affect your plans.  How much time do you, yourself, have to devote to the process?  If, realistically, you can contribute a few hours here and there to planning and executing, thinking about revitalizing a room is more realistic than redoing an entire floor or, gulp, your entire home.

Besides money and time, resources for you to consider as you plan include your skills (and you can learn some new ones, such as how to paint walls fairly easily) and already existing materials.  If you can paint rooms yourself, and don’t need to hire a painter, you can use the money you would have paid that painter to purchase a new sofa or entry way rug, for example.  Also, consider furnishings you have somehow come to possess, through purchase, gift, inheritance or a well-timed walk just after the item in question had been moved to the curb by a previous owner.  Have a painting you love?  Plan to incorporate it.  Always admired the wonderful credenza you inherited from your Aunt Beth but never had the right spot for it?  Change things up and plan a room around that credenza, stop trying to fit it in somewhere, anywhere.

And don’t forget your most important resource of all: friends.  If you have a friend that’s great at plastering or wall papering or laying tile, they are a resource.  After they help you out, and maybe even before they get to your place, you’ll need to reciprocate in whatever way you can.  And trades can work.  If the potential helper has always admired that credenza from Aunt Beth and you despise it, maybe they’d be happy to leave with it after re-tiling the floor of your bathroom.  Friends who use the useful sort of home re-do skills we’re talking about here professionally won’t be too keen on helping you out in the same way that amateurs will.  People who make their living tiling, etc., are unlikely to have much enthusiasm for giving their services away, even if you’re a friend.  The close relatives may, but that’s only because they’re your brother and they can hear Mom telling them to, and she can convey this message telepathically from Heaven if need be.

After you’ve figured out what you’ve got to work with, identify what your goal is for your home and all of the areas that comprise it, inside and out.  Doing this will help you decide what to do and how to prioritize your actions.

The most straightforward way to determine what your goals are is to ask yourself why you’re even considering making a change to your home.

Are you fed up with arriving home tired after a day of work and leaving equally exhausted the next morning?  If so, then you’re interested in creating a place where you can revitalize your mind after a long day using that brain intensely, and return to your life challenges refreshed.  Beyond feeling refreshed, do you simply want a space where you can relax?

Would you like to create a place where people have a great time together, whether they’re family, friends, or both?

If you’re like many people living a post (?) pandemic existence, you want and need your home to be many different things for you and the people you share it with.  You need to work, i.e., do whatever your job is, at home, while also relaxing, socializing (when and how allowed), cooking and heating (hopefully) healthy meals, etc.  Will you be relaxing, etc., alone, say in a room that’s your own private haven, or sharing the space with others?  To pack so much into a home requires zoning each and every space available.  Some areas will end up being more public, for example, where you might socialize and eat with people who don’t live in the home, other places more private, such as where you sleep.  Some spaces will have clearly defined and special functions, such as your home office and where you actually prepare meals.

As with most things, some combinations work better than others.  Try not to combine activities related to work and relaxation/sleep in one place (nix that home office in your bedroom) or those that are public and private (don’t set up the home gaming centre that you’ll share with guests in your bedroom either).  Other not so good combos are equally obvious—but just to give you some ideas—if you or someone you’ll share your home with has an eating issue, it’s probably best to separate areas for preparing foods from those for eating it.  Children of different ages, more than a few years apart, who have friends over are unlikely to simultaneously use a “play room” without inter-sibling warfare until they are basically full-grown adults.  Craft areas, complete with potentially noxious adhesives, etc., are not best housed where you’ll be preparing food that others will- yikes—ingest.  You get the idea, common sense must prevail.

In some cases, you’ll need to “zone” based on time of day.  The space where you socialize after the workday with others may be in the same set of four walls where you work out before that day begins.  Regularly, the best way to create a multi-function space is to think of different views through it and plan accordingly:  “When I stand here, I’ll see the sorts of things as I look out across this room that will give me the energize to exercise, and when I sit over here, I’ll see the things that make socializing and having wonderful conversations with others a breeze.  Folding screens, moveable furnishings, etc., also make multi-functionality both possible and pleasant.

When you’re “plotting” how each area you’ll work on will be used, it can be handy to draw a quick floor plan and write what will happen where on it.  That can help make sure that some “challenging” situations don’t arise—such as your office ending up near a space where the people you share your home with might gather with others to socialize at the same times when you may need to be working.

At this phase of the process, you know what you have to work with and what you want to achieve, at the level of your entire home and also in each space available to you.

The next step in the re-design process can be the most emotionally draining.  You goals for your home overall and each individual space in it need to be prioritized, first at the level of your entire home and then at the level of the individual spaces.

So, you may decide that your primary objective for your home is to be a place where you can relax and your secondary goal for your home is to be a place where you can work (at whatever you are paid to do) and the third level objective is to socialize with others.  Earlier, you’ve also determined that this space or that makes most sense for a meditation area or your home office and the overall priority list makes it clear what physical spaces will be worked on earlier or later.

After you have a prioritized list, you can allocate resources.  In the example above, first, priority was relaxation, and allocate the resources available first to that objective.  Specifically “costing out” options for relaxation, some of which are noted below, some of which are identified in other Space Doctors articles, for example, here LINK, requires considering what scientists have learned about how design can support relaxation, which is covered in Space Doctors articles, and also finding out how much things cost in your part of the world.  Move through your re-design list until your resources are exhausted.  If towards the end of this process, so few resources are left that you can’t realistically achieve a particular objective, reallocate them to projects already planned.  It’s better to save a project for another time, when additional resources are available, than to do it poorly, in a way that will be discouraging and disheartening as you pursue the home life you’ve envisioned.

In that space for relaxing, you may need to change the colour of the walls, add new table and floor lamps, re-upholster the sofa, add some green leafy plants, and add a screen to clearly define the space and block out views of other people using the space, for example.  Resources left over tasks related to relaxation are completed can be used to fine-tune your home office, taking whatever steps are necessary there.  Within each objective, such as relaxing, it may be necessary to establish sub-priorities, such as support for Zoom calls in a home office, especially as you move down your list.

When spaces align with the personalities of those that will use them life is better and it’s important that you fine tune whatever your design plans are to reflect your personality and the personalities of regular heavy users of it—in other words, whomever you live with.