Need to create your new home?
You are taking charge
You and your family lead busy and active lives. There’s work, school, celebrations, holidays, and much more. Your house serves as home to all of these. Life changes and extraordinary events, like that we’ve experienced over the past year, expose our lifestyle shortcomings and limitations.
You may now be facing the responsibility of solving new lifestyle challenges for your family. Your time is already compromised, and resources stretched paper-thin.
The challenges are great, the rewards are greater
If you are like most people these days, you have a newfound appreciation for your home’s role in supporting your family’s lifestyle and needs. The changing demands on your home revealed in the last few months have been significant.
Our homes’ expanded role now includes office(s), classroom(s), entertainment, shipping & receiving hub, quarantine recovery, and extended family accommodations. Our once comfortable routine is now compressed, with everyone in everybody’s business.
Usually, we adapt to any one of these challenges for a few days without significant disruption. As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” For many of us, it has been a good deal longer than three days.
Benefits for your family
Enough is enough. It’s time for your home to step up and adapt to the new demands. Many need to create a suitable workspace for an extended time or even permanently. Schools are beginning to reopen, but slowly. Your house needs to adapt to these new conditions and return our lifestyle to normal.
Everyone needs their personal space to work and play. We yearn to feel normal again. Designing a new home or renovating your existing home to adapt to the new demands is an excellent opportunity to make impactful enhancements for our lives.
There’s been a steep rise in demand for projects to expand capacity or to re-imagine their home experience in its entirety. Whether reconfiguring your existing spaces, adding new ones, or creating an entirely new home, we are amidst a sea change in how we perceive our homes.
Making a Plan
When you are considering your family’s new home, you can take steps to organize the journey and ensure you make the most of your efforts.
- Assess needs
- Diagnose challenges
- Conceive solutions
- Prepare budget
- Create action plan
Use tools to help gather and organize your thoughts and priorities. There are a plethora of tools and sources that are useful in planning. From spreadsheets, photo organizers, and websites like Pinterest, Instagram, and Houzz to name a few. As you collect your source images, be sure to add notes describing their value to you. What is it about each selected image making it worthy of referencing.
List the responsibilities and interests of each member of your family. Envision your best life, unconstrained by the limits of your existing home. Don’t limit your options with doubts or concerns about the budget. It’s best to get everything out onto the table so you can assess and prioritize. Doing this ensures that the most important things are not overshadowed or obscured by the less important. This clarity promotes value-based decision making.
Avoiding Disaster
Consider upcoming life events and how they may affect your needs. Make a note of frustrating or irritating conditions that fail to satisfy the way you live. A good plan addresses your current needs. An inspired program takes into account the future.
Most homes are notoriously short on storage, and we have but two options to resolve this. The first is to clear out the clutter. The second is to organize and make a place for those things valued enough to retain. We often find storage spaces being sacrificed or underappreciated during the design phase. The thought being “we’ll find a place for that after we move in.”
Remember that our homes are a collection of systems. They shelter us from the elements, keep us comfortable, inspire and support every aspect of our daily lives. Most of these systems are not apparent to us and do not enter our consciousness. Until, that is, they cause us discomfort.
Vision for a Better Future
Our homes and lives are at risk of becoming exercises in compromise and inevitable discontent. Necessity is the mother of invention. Take the time to create your perfect dream home thoughtfully.
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