Psst…Do You Hear That? It’s Your Intuition!
My bed is in my living room, my bathroom supplies are in my study, and my skis are in my kitchen. This is the sort of bizarre house I’ve been living in the past four months. And before you even ask, no, this is most certainly not by choice. It all started when I came home from a relaxing News Year’s weekend away at the beach. I was so proud of myself for having gotten the basement all organized and cleaned up for my Christmas guests, a task I knew I needed to do, but had been dreading for most of 2014. I was just thinking to myself, “Wow, 2015 is going to be great. It feels so nice to come home to such an organized basement.” Instead of walking in to my newly organized basement though, I walked in to a wet, flooded disaster. Well hello 2015!
It turns out that the Universe didn’t think my basement was organized enough. Which in hindsight, it really wasn’t. You see, my idea of an organized basement was hiding all my unorganized stuff. Out of sight out of my mind, that was my basement motto and I thought it was working pretty well. Behind the organized facade, there was still armoires full of clothes and things I hadn’t looked at since I moved in, baskets of old games and photos that were covered in dust, and old shoe boxes full of broken nails and tools that I swore up and down would come in handy some day.
The basement is the foundation of my home. Yes, it stores all my junk and things I can’t bear to part with, but it also stores a lot of memories. It houses paintings that my grandmother had done as a young woman, my grandfather’s antique suit hanger that has a place for coins, my daughters rocking chair and her schoolwork, and somewhere down there is a very sentimental letter from my father. Truth be told, the foundation of my home was still a huge mess, because I couldn’t even find some of these treasures amongst all the stuff before the flood.
It took water bursting in bossily and taking over all four rooms of my basement, countless loads of wet towels through the laundry, and a pricey repair job for me to realize that I had been ignoring the nagging voice in the back of my head telling me to clean this place up for years. I told myself it was good enough to hide the mess and just clean the surface, but this flood damage made me really go back to the drawing board and reevaluate the stuff I was clinging so tightly to. Did I really need or want all these things that were clogging up my home? Were they really adding value and purpose to my life, or were they weighing it down?
My house is my home and my sanctuary. When it’s clean and organized, my life feels clean and organized. Naturally, the basement project decided to march it’s way upstairs and now I’ve got construction projects happening on two floors of my house, but hey, since when do construction projects ever go as planned? Even though my home is not quite there yet, it’s a work in progress and I already feel like it’s heading towards a better place. Soon my bed will be back in my bedroom, my bathroom supplies will actually be in my bathroom, and visitors won’t confuse my kitchen for a ski rental shop. It takes time, patience, and sometimes a natural disaster, but our intuition will catch up to us one way or another. In the end, I finally decided to listen to mine and I haven’t looked back since.
10 Tips for Following your Intuition in your Home
When your intuition keeps nudging you, follow it’s impulses. It can save you a lot of heartache.
Don’t avoid the work you need to face, it’ll catch up to you in the end.
Organization takes a lot of work and getting a friend to help makes it so much easier. You can even make a trade.
When in doubt, throw it out.
When you have a box ready for donation, take it away asap. You might be tempted to rethink it and take something out.
Just because you create more storage areas doesn’t mean you need to hold onto stuff you are not really using.
Breath deeply and often. It takes a lot of patience to live in a messy cluttered home, even if there is purpose to it.
Be single minded. When in a remodel and have important work to do, you might want to go elsewhere to do it or create an organized corner in your home where you can focus on your task at hand. Don’t work amongst all the chaos.
This is the time to live in the future and imagine how nice things will look and feel when your remodel is all done and your life and home are more organized than ever.
Choose a contractor with your intuition. Trust that your contractor has your best interest at heart, even if things go much slower than anticipated.