Feel Like Home
Dear friends,
I know been a while but I'm back for a bit. Ironically one of the reasons I've been away for a while, has to do with the content of this post. As I have been working on making my space’s feel like my spaces. While it sounds exciting and new, it does take a lot of time and effort; sometimes can be quite eye opening.
If you haven't been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you will know life has been getting stupidly expensive. I mean, this is what we all grew up and wanted to be right? We all wanted to be mid-thirties and cannot afford, your own home. Which is something that has been a bit of a sticking point for me for such a long time. Mainly by doing the thing I shouldn’t be doing; comparing myself to other people. However, unlike them, they had chances and good fortunes. Not all of us was so lucky. Which is why, when I think about my living situation, and how it was meant to be temporary, and it's going to be eleven years in a month. The thing is, some people were willing to make the sacrifices that I wasn't or others weren't. That’s why when I think about people I know who are still with family, it's a small number, but it's a number I feel in good company about.
Regardless of all that, I had my plan of buying, but when I used all my savings to support my year off; I now know that's going to take me at least another three or four years before it becomes a possibility. But we’ll see. I decided to do something about my current position, and make my mum's home start to feel like it's my home too, because in a lot of ways it is.
As you should know, I finally have a full time job again. A it’s a job where I am paid, somewhat what I’m worth (I’m working on getting what I am). Which allowed me to finally do something about my current situation. It's not that I could do much, but I could do a little to make myself feel more comfortable, and make it how I wanted it to be. That being said, I wanted to do all this because, when you live in terrible social housing, and the house is infested with mould, and things are constantly falling off the walls; it really limits my choices. Not to mention, only having one room, what could I do?
What I ended up doing was using space that was unclaimed. To expand, and not restrict myself to just one room. With that in mind, I was able to free myself and not worry about it. The first thing I wanted to do was get rid of clutter. If it can’t fit in the loft, or a storage box it had to go. To the charity shop, a friend, work or the bin. If you know me, I am big on physical media, so 90% of that was staying. While I also wanted things to look more controlled and curated rather than… I'll get to this later. With that all in mind, I set out to get it all sorted.
I would like tell you all about what I did, to get my room looking like how I wanted it. However, I will cut it short and just say, it was a mistake! I can confidently admit I made a mistake. With all my careful planning, and thinking I did, I still made a mistake. Why you might ask? Simply put, it was so much work, and like most things I do, I always think about what is the worst thing that can go wrong, and how can I correct it. Well sadly this time, what went wrong were things I had not thought of. Then when things kept on taking longer than I wanted, I knew I had made a mistake. However, I managed to fix the mistakes I made, and learn from it.
What I learned from it was, I am no longer able to do any more home DIY. Sure it might be cheaper, but I am going to pay people to do it, because it gets things done sooner, and when things go wrong you have some to blame? Yes I am! I mean it took me 6 weeks to get everything done. Now do bear in mind this was in between working, so it wasn’t all the time I could spend on it. When I think about it, I started two weeks before that, to get things in boxes and move around the house. So eight weeks, and the thing is I am still not finished.
This issue was the painting. As I had some ideas of just doing some touch ups. However, with the mould I previously mentioned. When I cleaned it took off so much of the paint, as it was that deep into the walls. I had to change things. Changing things meant I had to start with a blank canvas, as painting the yellow on the purple wall wasn’t going to give everything an even looking coat. Then another mistake I made was, deciding to have a feature wall. You know, make some geometric shapes on my wall, and use that as my colours. Of course this makes things take longer. Then extra annoyance was the fact that some of the paint, for some reason, peeled off the wall when I was finishing up. Meaning now I have to do some touch ups with my little paint brush.
What I am going to do, I am going to continue to slowly work away towards my goal. But this is one of those things where this is a marathon not a sprint. It is going to take me a long time to reach my end goal. Especially when I need time to relax and recuperate, from these damn kids! But I know when I get to the summer I can finish off all the rest of the jobs, and make it feel like home.
Xo FabEs
