Since my husband and I moved into our first “just us” place sixteen years ago, I’ve felt a strong desire to create a happy, cozy home.
But I spent a lot of time as a young mom not exactly knowing how to do that. Did a happy home need to be perfectly tidy? Decorated a certain way, like the pictures in magazines? Would it require chore charts and expensive organizing systems? Nightly sing-a-longs and elaborate family dinners?
Over the years, my definition of a happy home has become a lot more laid-back. Of course, the first ingredient is love, and that’s universal. But what other traits have the power to make a home happier?
Happy homes can be created and defined in a lot of different ways, but here are five “ingredients” that rank high on my list:
1. Everyone gets to be him- or herself.
My #1 definition of a happy home? A safe, comfortable refuge for the people who live in it. And according to my philosophy, people feel most comfortable and safe when they’re free to be themselves.
I’m working hard to create a family culture in which everyone’s unique strengths and traits are accepted and celebrated. We aren’t all good at the same things, and we don’t all care about the same things, but it’s my goal that we all support and love each other for the people we really are.
2. It’s functional – not perfect.
A lot of moms stress out about creating a perfectly clean home, or finding the magical organizing system that will make everything effortlessly fall into place. But to me, the goal of cleaning, organizing and even furnishing is to create a functional – not perfect or Pinterest-worthy – home.
How do I define a “functional” home? It’s:
- Clean enough that everyone feels comfortable
- Organized enough that everyone can get their work done, keep track of their treasured objects, and lay hands on a pencil, notebook, or frying pan when needed
- Decorated enough to feel lived-in and personal, and like it’s got some history…whether the “decor” is a carefully-curated collection of original art, or bowls of pinecones gathered from treks around the block.
“Functional” homes don’t need to be magazine-cover perfect; just good-enough in the ways that matter. And I personally think a home that looks like a work-in-progress is way more interesting than a house that looks like it just came off the shelf.
3. It feels good to be in.
When I was growing up, my mom “made do” with most of the furnishings and accessories from her early marriage – which meant that in the 80s, when all my friends’ houses were sporting wall-to-wall mauve carpeting and gold-tone lamps, our house was abundant in late 60’s and 70’s brown, orange, pea green and mustard.
Still, I always felt good in our home. It’s not that my mom put a lot of time or any money at all, really, into decorating, but everything always felt thoughtfully arranged and homey.
Not long before she died, my mother shared a story about the first house she and my dad lived in after they got married. She told me that the house was small, and she hated it, always wishing for something bigger and better. But later, she realized that it had been a cute house with great potential, something she could easily have made into a cozy, lovely home if she’d approached it with an attitude of gratitude and creativity.
I’ve never forgotten that story and have tried to bring my mom’s attitude into every home we’ve lived in, no matter its flaws.
4. It supports the whole family’s needs.
Our large family has lived in houses of varying sizes, so I’ve learned that square footage is less important than how you use the space you have. One of my goals is to create a home that nurtures different family members’ needs for socializing and solitude, noise and quiet – not always easy to do in a house with seven people!
With that in mind I’ve worked to create different “zones” in the house that can be places to shout and laugh or study and reflect…though sometimes the same zone can serve different purposes at different times of the day.
My kids are definitely inconvenienced and annoyed from time to time, and they’ve had to learn to compromise, but it’s my aim that any kid who needs a quiet nook to work math problems, or a safe place to blow off steam, can find it – though he might also need to be patient and wait his turn.
5. It’s full of laughter.
All families have different languages. In our house different family members “speak” music and books, sports and movies, in varying levels of fluency…but our primary vocabulary, the way we all communicate and connect best, is through laughter.
Whether we’re cracking up over a corny joke, watching The Great Outdoors for the seventeenth time, or gently ribbing one another around the dinner table, laughter is the one thing we all share equally…from Mom and Dad down to the “baby” of the family.
We can be pretty silly, but we’ve created some amazing memories, the kind of tales we tell again and again. For us, the all-important “family mythology” almost always begins with a funny story.
This list isn’t exhaustive by any means – I could easily come up with five more! But instead, I’d love to know: what ‘ingredients’ do you think are necessary to make a happy home?
Number one is HUGE for me, too. It’s also important that our home is welcoming for friends and family – which to me means a place they can also feel comfortable being themselves.
Yes! Hospitality is a big one in my book. It might have been #6 if I’d gotten that far 🙂
You are right on point with this list Meagan. I would echo that the first and most important element to anything family-wise should be love.
Pinterest has had somewhat of a backlash effect in my life, and I really have to get my mind focused on what matters most. Would it be nice to have perfectly organized everything? Yes, but not to the point that it stresses out the household. Would it be nice to upgrade the decor? Sure, but not at the expense of other things that we have placed greater priority on at the moment.
Life really is all about priorities. I have found it is good to do a gut check periodically to make sure that what I am pointing my time and energy toward matches up with what matters most to me. Everybody’s priorities are different.
Marjorie – I’ve had to change the way I relate to Pinterest and remember that the majority of the pins I see are not projects that other “regular moms” like me are doing, but are professionally-produced, staged, propped and styled photos. It’s easy to forget that when you see all your peers pinning stuff, but MOST of us live normal lives in normal homes. 🙂
I think we’re doing okay, except that Mr. Sandwich and I would agree that we are neither clean enough nor organized enough. It’s not a lack of space or storage–our house is small, but more than adequate–it’s that we have too much stuff. And at the moment, we don’t have time to cull it.
You know what cured me of clutter and “stuff”? Moving! We moved several times over a three-year period, and after the last move we put all the boxes in one room of the house instead of putting anything away. We painstakingly went through every single box and made tough decisions about every single item. At the end of the process fully 1/3 of the stuff we’d moved went right back out the door. It was painful, but man! I am so much better about what stuff I will bring into the house now. It might take finding a quiet Sunday afternoon to just go through room by room and cull.
Actually, having the third kid helped a lot too because that was when I stopped shopping for fun 🙂
Why would happy be the main goal? Sometimes the “best” experiences in life where growth, accomplishment, problem-solving, problem addressing take place are far from “happy.” Denial, avoidance and pretending are probably the best ways to “happy” but those are false and lead to harm.
Frustration, anger, sadness, despair, loss, disappointment, loneliness. etc. are all there for a good reason as well – why pretend otherwise? Especially for children. All of life’s complexity seems best embraced.
Kevin, since basically my entire online presence is based on the concept of finding more happiness 🙂 I guess I disagree that these things are mutually exclusive. Yes, it’s important to me to have a happy family life. To me “happy” doesn’t mean we never experience sadness, disappointment or frustration. It means that beneath it all there is a current of contentment that we can return to. And why can’t accomplishment, problem-solving and growth be happy experiences? Certainly they can be uncomfortable, but they also lead to satisfaction and TRUE happiness – not just fleeting moments of pleasure or fun.
Kevin, you’re missing the point. The point isn’t to avoid all of those things. No one can avoid it. The point is to give your family a safe place to land after riding the waves of those things. And that is what home should really be — your shelter in the storm. The one place in the world where you know there is peace, comfort, love, acceptance… all those things that most people strive for in their families. Do we sometimes fall short? Sure! But the point is to keep learning, keep trying, and keep loving through it all. 🙂
I don’t really follow Kevin’s comment, but we are optimisits. For us, it’s just that the laughter helps us deal with things. Our kids have been through a lot, and we have never sugar coated anything. But they also know none of our hard times have been the “end of the world” and we can still laugh at the end of the day.
This reminds me, another relative went through a nightmare that I wouldn’t even know where to begin to explain, and my spouse sent her a funny DVD (one of his favorite comedies). When it was his turn to deal with some life threatening issues, everyone wrote him a note of encouragement and support. His cousin wrote that she didn’t believe it was possible, but he was able to make her laugh in her darkest hours, with that DVD. I think that sums it up beautifully. & you have to know that he is a very grounded person that people tend to look up to and come to with serious problems. It might be easy to picture the class clown who denies all their feelings, but it’s not that kind of thing at all. My spouse in particular is the one you want there in your hardest hours. Maybe because he will listen, be supportive, AND make you laugh.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately – our house is quickly becoming a place that doesn’t support our family’s needs. I know generations of kids were raised in this old Victorian of ours, but we need more yard space for the kids, fewer stairs for our rapidly aging parents and larger kitchen. I am working to make our house ” work” for us but also looking forward to choosing a different house for our different needs down the road.
Courtney, I hear that. I’ve always been drawn to old Victorians, and I used to huff and puff when I saw magazine layouts where somebody tore out the historically-accurate galley kitchen to put in an open concept, or whatever. But in our last house it quickly became apparent that my romantic ideas about the way a home should feel aren’t necessarily all that conducive to family life the way I want to live it! Our new house has a more modern (early midcentury) layout and it just works so much better for us. I’m still not sure I could bring myself to tear down a wall in an old house, but I don’t judge anyone else for it!
Great List! I would write the same list, but not surprising because I love this blog. 😀
I really enjoy hearing about how you’ve intentionally incorporated each individual’s needs/personalities into the picture. We’re still very much in the phase where we grownups sort of set the tone for little people, but I imagine that changes over time.
The one thing I thought to add is “an intentional pace of life”. I find that there are times when I (we) feel overscheduled or overcommitted and it really makes our home life less happy. Then there have been times when we don’t have enough going on, and that isn’t quite right either. One of the things I’m learning as a mom is finding the pace (by which I mean, mostly, how many outside activities we do, invitations we accept, etc.) of life that’s right for ME. I lean toward the more slow/minimalist style, but there’s an extreme that isn’t right for me there either.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I really wished I had something like your blog to read when I was a new mom. I spent so much time trying to keep up with what I thought was the be all end all to be a great mom. It wasn’t my style and I was miserable. My boys are now 9 & 11 and this past year I have been true to my self and we are all so much happier for it. Your writing really rings true with me.
Kim, thank you so much – that makes me smile.