The House Edit

Giving ourselves space to breathe

I spent much of the last two weeks redecorating, and have finally emerged to tell you about it.

The story begins at my mom’s house, where I spent six days puttering around her house with her, cleaning out closets and cabinets, donating clothes and household items that hadn’t seen the light of day in years, rearranging furniture, distributing dishes to the various kitchens (yes, it’s a thing), and generally editing the house so it’s easier to maintain and a more joyful place in which to live.

And then I got home wanting to do the same to my own house.

My passion for the clean lines and uncluttered look of mid-century modern décor has grown in recent years, approximately hand-in-hand with the amount of stuff our family of four has accumulated, especially since several of us are collectors of things. My collections are books and graphic poster art, so shelves and walls are full. But closets in our 1950s ranch-style house are minimal, bedrooms are small, and ceilings are 8’ tall, so the feeling of spaciousness is actually vital to my creativity. And because I’m me, I project that onto my kids too (“how can you breathe in here with all that stuff everywhere?”).

If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I project-managed the redesign of our kitchen two years ago, so that was the first room I tackled when I got home from my mom’s. The open shelves on either side of the refrigerator needed a serious editing, and once that was done, I turned my eyes to the 12-foot-long dining table at the far end of the family room that we inherited from a friend’s cross-country move, and which we use as a desk. I say “we” when I really mean that Ed uses it as a desk, and I use it as a storage place for all my book-related things.

So, organizing, editing, clearing, and cleaning the desk took another day. The tabletop on my side of the desk is now clear, though my yarn stash is still stored beneath it, and my kitchen witchery supplies (everything needed to make lip balm and skin cream) have yet to find a home beyond the shelf under the printer where they landed during the kitchen remodel. I joke that I didn’t have robotics mom and bagpipe mom on my bingo card of life, but somehow knitter and kitchen witch made it on with no comment.

My 16-year-old inherited the bedroom he used to share with his sibling, and had mostly just added to it rather than ever properly making it his own. It was still the lovely sunrise yellow I’d painted it when we moved in, though I could spot all the footprints on the walls where the bunkbeds had once stood, and the four tall Billy bookcases from Ikea sagged under the weight of 20 years of kid books. Book collections like that happen when you’re the child of a reader, and though we had culled the Bob the Builder and most of the dinosaur books long ago, there were still lots that recalled long afternoons spent reading out loud. To my kid’s credit, he carefully went through every book, placing them in stacks to keep and piles to donate. He works in the archives at our local public library, and his first job was sorting through book donations, so he firmly believes that’s where all unhoused books belong.

We spent all day emptying his bedroom – I tackled the big stuff while he methodically picked through the bits and pieces of life that get put on a shelf to look at later. I appreciated his method – as the not-a-book things came off the shelves they were either discarded immediately, put into a donate pile, or stashed in a large box to consider later, just so we could clear the room. Then, while I cleaned up spiders and little kid footprints and boogers off the walls and floors, he took the boxes into the family room to sort through more thoroughly. My last task of the day was taping baseboards and ceiling before moving his mattress and box spring out of our room and back into his for the night. The kid slept in the bed we call the cupboard under the stairs, despite the fact that we have a one-story house (we cleared out part of a random closet in our family room and tucked the headboard of a twin bed in it behind a screen). It’s a place for a kid to sleep when a grandmother comes to visit and we need their bedroom, or when a robotics team stayed up late before an early morning tournament, and the kids crashed on whatever soft surface they found. It’s also a space to escape the chaos of a bedroom redesign, and a way to pretend to still be asleep when Mom gets up early to paint.

Painting a room is one of those tasks, like walking the dog or cleaning the house that is done best with an audiobook in one’s ears. It was perfect for a re-listen of The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells, which remains my most recommended audiobook series to readers of any genre. I still had Farrow & Ball paint leftover from my kitchen remodel – Pointing, a soft white that looks as rich and warm as the thick cream at the top of the glass bottles of milk we used to get from a farm in place of the legal fees they owed my dad, and Inchyra blue, a dark blue/green/gray that changes with the light like the ocean on a stormy day – and the kid agreed to a white room with an Inchyra wall. Painting a 12x10 foot bedroom can be done in a day with paint that dries in four hours per coat, and it is one of the most satisfying transformations to any space, and resulted in a surprise (to me) re-painting of one wall outside his door too. I am not a methodical perfectionist, I am a big-picture visionary, so the little mistakes don’t make me crazy. It’s why I can paint a wall in the same amount of time it takes Ed to tape off the wall sockets – his work will be perfect, and mine will make a splash. Fortunately for our marriage, he has learned to appreciate the big picture, and I have learned to forgive the amount of time perfection requires.

My kid spent one more night in the cupboard under the stairs and then the fun began. Two of the bookcases went back into the corner where the bed had been. The desk remained under the window, where the view of the street is the antidote to boring homework, and the bed moved to the new blue wall. I brought the books back in and my kid reshelved them. I made the bed while he found homes for the non-book treasures that survived the purge. One piece of art – a framed poster from the Dawson City Music Festival – made it onto the wall, and the blue wall remains blank, waiting for a museum reproduction or a map or some other treasure from our upcoming trip to Scotland. We have plans for a shadow box to display his bagpiping medals, and we still need to tackle the closet, but my kid has a new room that he loves, and I feel a lightness in our home. It’s as if the corner of the house that had been groaning under the weight of all the stuff that comes with living in the same place for 17 years can breathe again, and the accumulation of the souvenirs of life has been curated by the person who holds their memories.

We all live in an accumulation of souvenirs – things that represent different times in our lives when teaching ourselves to knit helped us get through COVID lockdown, or skin rashes were an excuse to make petroleum-free lip balm. Our books take us on journeys when they’re not collecting dust, the photos and art on our walls bring us joy when we remember to look at them. We can add the museum ticket stubs to scrapbooks, or throw them away, but in this digital age, we no longer need to keep the guides and maps and receipts from that trip to London ten years ago. And when we curate the physical manifestations of our memories, we give ourselves space to breathe, and distance to be able to step back and actually see the things we’ve decided are important enough to keep.

What I’ve spent the last two weeks doing may look like redecorating, but it’s a lot like writing a book. A lifetime of experience, of collecting stories and memories and ideas goes on the page (or in the house). But when the words are edited and the clutter is removed the meaningful story is given space to breathe. And just like an edited book gives the reader the most interesting story, an edited space can remind us of what’s truly important, what we really need in life, and what brings us joy.