The story below is a preview from our January/February 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Living through a home project can be messy, but small steps like gradual decluttering, starting with exciting tasks and styling temporary spaces can make the process more enjoyable.
Stacked symmetry can look like part of your home rather than a mess.
Post-holidays, it’s not uncommon for the decoration clear-out to snowball into a bit of a decluttering spree that might reveal some of the ways your home isn’t as functional or beautiful as you’d like. You might find yourself looking around your home in January and feeling the itch to refresh and the “new year, new me!” energy might inspire you to address these gaps now.
But we all know that creating the home you love doesn’t come as easily as the desire to do so. While it’s one thing to put together a vision board or scroll through Pinterest with decision and excitement, the implementation process often goes much less smoothly…and much, much more slowly. Whether you’re DIYing or working with a designer and a larger budget, delays are inevitable. Chances are high that you will have to live in a space that is, at least for a time, in progress. AKA: kind of a mess.
The prospect of living in the in-between states of a design project can sometimes be enough of a deterrent to even start. Repainting, upgrading furniture, or even just rearranging a room can require lots of temporary solutions like boxing up shelves’ of books and picture frames and leaving them stacked in less-than-convenient places as you work. Sometimes you have to remove old items before the replacements arrive, which at best, might leave an empty eyesore; at worst, a functional nightmare. Losing the use of a bathroom or a kitchen appliance might even be more than an inconvenience, depending on your needs and whether or not you have another option during the waiting period. Maybe your project requires kids moving into the same room, or the whole family sharing one toilet, or maybe you have to actually live somewhere else for the interim. Logistics, planning and flexibility are all components of design that require time and emotional bandwidth and sometimes there just isn’t enough to go around!
But if you have a home project that you’re tired of delaying, there are ways to make the WIP (work in progress) stage a little bit easier. Don’t let the idea of short-term inconvenience or mess put you off turning your dreams into a reality a moment longer: This is your year to make your home dreams come true.
Declutter: Slowly, Without Delay.
Start off the new year by clearing out the clutter and organizing your home, one step at a time.
The number one way to minimize the annoyance of living in a space-in-progress is to clear out the extraneous clutter. If you’ve got to put things in boxes or in temporary piles to make room for your project, nothing will make it more frustrating than the presence of the stuff you less-than-love. Take the opportunity to do a quick clear out and give yourself the blankest canvas you can muster.
The best way to keep a decluttering objective from turning into its own enormous project is to not think of it as a project at all. Instead of designating a whole weekend to clearing out the entire house, adopt the compound effect approach and do it piecemeal, over a longer period of time. The trick is to strike a key balance between immediate action and slower overall progress: The moment you find yourself thinking “We should really donate that lamp,” unplug the lamp and put it in your car. Similar to the five-minutes-or-less rule, where you challenge yourself to do any task that takes less than five minutes the moment you become aware of it, approach decluttering the same way. You’ll be surprised how much progress you’ll make in clearing out your home without torpedoing a full day to do so.
A variation on this is to keep a donation box in a convenient location like the garage, or near the recycling bin for household items and a separate one in the closet or next to the laundry for clothes. When the box is full, donate it. (You can use a decorative basket or other visually pleasing container if a cardboard box stresses you out.) This process gives you a little time to test out what it feels like to get rid of something you’re on the fence about: Put it in the box, and if you find yourself thinking about it before you donate it, you can take it back out. If not, bid it farewell.
Decluttering should be an ongoing process in your home, as you enter new stages and find yourself either figuratively or literally outgrowing things from other parts of your life. So consider this part more of a habit-building practice rather than a single task needing to be completed by a particular date. The more you do it, the more decisive you’ll be, and eventually it will all come full circle, making you a better buyer when you go to purchase something new.
Dessert First
“Dessert first” is a piece of writing advice about how to get yourself engaged in a new project –– especially a longer format or more ambitious project. To put it simply, start with whatever you’re most excited about. Don’t delay working on the things you have passion and energy for, especially not at the beginning, when the road ahead looks so long. Eat your dessert first.
The benefits of this approach is that it gives you momentum. Instead of starting with something hard, intimidating, or tricky that can present the sort of roadblocks that might kill your desire to continue, go for the thing that will only fuel your excitement. For a home design project, this could be the idea that really has your heart, like the peel-and-stick statement wallpaper you want in the bathroom. Or it could be the part of a project you can knock out completely in a short period of time, like swapping all throw blankets and pillows out for a new season. “Dessert” just has to mean whatever is going to give you that delicious, satisfied feeling once you get started. Whether that’s seeing fast progress or a particular wall paint color you just can’t wait to see in person, go for it. Jump right in, get a little dirty and knock down the first domino of your home design project.
Want even more tips for making living through home projects a little less overwhelming, including ways to make the mess more visually appealing? Check out the latest issue, now on newsstands, or see it for free in our digital guide linked below!
The story above is a preview from our January/February 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!