6 Steps To Making Home
Making home. Two simple words with a depth of meaning that is so much more than just a physical home. In this post, I will be digging into what “making home” really means and giving you specific action steps to help you make it happen.
Making Home
I love the phrase “making a house a home”. It’s a fantastic description of what I am deeply passionate about and excited to share with you today! But to simplify, I’ve shortened it to “making home”.
Our homes are incredibly important to our family life. It is NOT about making home a showplace because we all know that isn’t possible if we want to live in our home. It IS all about making your family feel that home is where they feel most loved and love to be. Our homes are where we make deposits into our children’s memory banks that make a lasting impression for a lifetime.
To begin, you Mama, are the COO (Chief Operating Officer) of your home. Moms are the creators and sustainers of most things that happen in our homes. Making home starts with us, and like the quote says “If Mama ain’t happy ain’t nobody happy.”
Let’s go COO
Making home starts with mom’s attitude and outlook as every new day approaches. If Mama is happy and has a good attitude, then there is a good chance her family will too. You, mama, have a major role in setting the tone for your home.
I believe that the best way to do that is to find time in your day to spend with God. This can be done in so many ways in today’s world. Don’t get bogged down on a particular way to do it, just find ways to input God and his word into your heart, whether that be through reading the Bible, listening to worship music, or being still and listening or praying to God. Set the tone in your heart, and your home will follow.
It’s the Little Things
Other than making time for God, there were certain things that helped me feel accomplished in my day. First, I vacuumed every evening after the kids went to bed. Second, I tried to clear my kitchen sink before going to bed. And lastly, I did my best to make the bed in the morning. This task takes 2 minutes at most (unless you have 18 pillows to add to your bed🤪).
These little tasks helped me to feel accomplished each and every day. I didn’t always do them all, but I tried. As a result, at the end of the day, when I crawled back into that made bed, I felt at least a little accomplished, and when I woke up the next morning, it felt good to start the day all over again.
What is that task for you? Do you have something you can do every day to give you a feeling of accomplishment? Perhaps it is throwing in a load of laundry, emptying the dishwasher, or even just taking a shower.
Our homes can’t be perfect, and believe me when I say ours wasn’t; however, we can do little things to give us success along the way. These little accomplishments can boost our mood and change our outlook on the day ahead.
Now that we’ve set the tone for our day, I’ve compiled six steps to help you on your journey to making home. Taking these steps can really help in making home a place your family loves to be, now, and for years to come.
Six Steps to Making Home
Get organized
To get started, I have two words for you…Marie Kondo. Who jumped on the Marie Kondo bandwagon and then quickly fell off? It was all the rage at the beginning of the pandemic because we suddenly had time to do it. But is it a reality? Trust me when I say, with raising four kids, I know that keeping things organized can be a challenge.
That being said, life can be so much more enjoyable and less chaotic if you are able to control even a small part of the environment around you.
Declutter
To begin, let’s talk about decluttering and keeping our homes more SIMPLIFIED. When I am in the midst of clutter, I find it somewhat difficult to accomplish tasks and completely focus. Clutter can be like a noose around your neck or an anchor weighing down your ship.
Purge
Life is weighty enough. Weighing down your home with a lot of extra stuff can be detrimental to your goal of creating a home where everyone loves to be. It can be overwhelming and overwhelm can lead to paralysis, which leads to nothing getting accomplished.
I want to encourage you to purge unused items and organize everything else. Keep only those things that bring you joy or are absolutely necessary.
Get Help
If you need to hire an organizer and can afford it then do it! I know people who have done this, and it helped them so much. It may be worth the money. There is nothing wrong with asking for help!
If that isn’t in your budget, perhaps you have a friend, and you both need to organize. You can do it together by helping her, and then she can help you. After all, isn’t it so much more fun doing projects with a friend?
Start Small
Start small. Don’t overwhelm yourself by saying you have to organize your whole home. But start in the rooms you are in the most. Perhaps the kitchen or mudroom. Start with your drop zone. Just dedicate 30 minutes a day to one space and don’t go past that 30 minutes.
I love the philosophy of rotating toys. It lessens the number of toys around and also allows your children to have fresh, exciting toys on a regular basis.
This is my laundry room. A few years ago, I decided to clean, paint, organize, and make it pretty. It is small and houses the door to our garage. This is a room I am in EVERY SINGLE DAY. See my post on our Laundry Room Makeover to see the before and after.
By adding open shelves above the washer and dryer, placing some much-needed hooks in strategic places, and adding a little decor, it made it so much more enjoyable to be in.
Clearing away the clutter in your home helps to clear away the clutter in your mind, and by doing so, you move your house one step closer to becoming the home you and your family love to be.
Fill Your Home With Smells
This might seem like a strange one, but stay with me. Filling your home with wonderful smells that trigger feelings and create memories is all a part of fostering a warm, cozy home.
We have moved six times in our 34 years of marriage. Every time we moved into a new house, the first thing I did, even before the moving truck was unloaded, was to light a candle to fill the house with a scent that reminded us of home.
This was the first step in making our new house our home. Some of my favorite scents include coffee, mocha, cinnamon, pumpkin, vanilla, or any mixture of those. I also like some of the fruity smells, such as apple, melon, strawberry, and anything with orange in it.
You can use candles or oils, or whatever your mode of scent is. I love the smell of thieves, lavender, orange, and frankincense oils. I put a drop of oil in my face cream every night. The smell is so amazing as well as calming.
I can’t talk about smells and not mention coffee. Who doesn’t love the smell of coffee? We live for coffee in our home. We purchased a Nespresso machine last year and we are obsessed with it. BEST CUP of COFFEE! We love it so so much that we packed it up and took it on vacation.
Other smells can be a favorite meal cooking like tacos or chili, cinnamon rolls or bacon, or the smell of chocolate chip cookies. See my post, Chocolate Chip Cookies: A Family Tradition. You more than likely already have smells that remind your family of home, but if not, this is a great time to start!
Establish Traditions
Traditions are a huge part of making a home. I love the following definition of traditions. Traditions are the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction.
What traditions do you have? For our family, it is having a candle lit most of the time, church on Sunday, chocolate chip cookies, family movie nights, watching football (Go Eagles), and soccer games (Go Union). It was having dinner at the table on the regular, sitting at the kitchen island together making breakfast, playing games together (Speed Uno is our favorite), and having Chinese food dinners. When our children were young, it involved bedtime routines including reading and praying.
My family is playing games together at Thanksgiving
These are just a few of the traditions we enjoyed in our home. Did we set out to call these traditions? Not really. But have they become traditions simply because we repeatedly did them? Absolutely!
What are you repeatedly doing in your home? Think about what you do on a regular basis and start to name them out loud. These traditions will be what your children love about your home and what they long for when they get older. They may even do them with their own families and then be passed along to the next generation.
As a side note, it’s okay to change traditions along the journey or add new ones. It is all part of it. Don’t get hung up on keeping one if it is not relevant or working for you anymore.
Have fun with it and be intentional, purposeful, and mindful as you establish traditions in your homes. Having traditions will definitely create a warm and fuzzy feeling of home.
Emphasize Family Identity
How is your family identified? How do they identify themselves?
My husband used to always say, “We are the Grant family,” and this is how we live. When our children were young, we would remind them of expected behaviors prior to gathering with others. These chats included subjects such as manners, respect for others, kindness, etc.
This was a good training ground for our kiddos, but it also reminded them of who we were as a family and who we represented-God first and foremost.
God First
God has always been a huge part of that identity. Teaching your children about the love of God and how we love because he first loved is the most important lesson to teach your children.
Teach your children to love and respect God, you, and one another. This will become a huge part of your identity. Arguing and disagreements are okay.
Disagreements are unavoidable in a family. But loving each other in spite of a disagreement should always be the end result. Teach them to say I’m sorry and to forgive. Teach them to have each other’s backs no matter what. Friends come and go. I know it sounds cliché, but it’s true, FAMILY IS FOREVER!
create a family purpose statement and mantra
Create a family purpose statement together and discuss it on a regular basis. Come up with a family mantra and say it together before a meal or bedtime. This gives your family identity.
When your children have a strong sense of identity in who they are and it is centered around God, family, and home, they will develop a deep fondness and love for their home, and they will treasure their memories of home.
Foster a Warm Environment
What is the atmosphere in your home from day to day? “Your home is warm and cozy and peaceful.” These are words I long to hear as people enter our home. When someone tells me our home is warm and cozy, it brings joy to my heart. But more importantly, it is when they say they feel at peace in our home. This is a sign that they are at ease and comfortable. That, of course, is the ultimate goal.
Cozy items around your home
How do you create a feeling of warmth? Kindness, love, and grace are, of course, three biggies. But items like intimate lighting, family pictures, pillows, blankets to grab and wrap yourself in, family treasures passed down, “words” or Bible verses on signs. These items have a huge impact on making home.
I love having words around our home to remind us every day of who we are and who we strive to be. My post called How to Create A Gallery Wall of Love will elaborate a little more on this subject.
boundaries, Rules & Discipline
Another way to foster a warm environment is to remember we can’t always have a peaceful home, but we can have a peace-filled home. There can be peace among the natives when boundaries, rules, and discipline are utilized. You can read more about this again in my post How to Set The Foundation for a Loving Home. Kids thrive and excel when boundaries are given.
It is important to have expectations (appropriate ones) for your children. If there are no expectations, then what do your children have to attain? Established rules and resulting consequences for rules broken are imperative. If there are no consequences, rules won’t work. Listen carefully to the following statement:
“Unclear rules and sporadic reinforcement breeds insecurity in children”-Kim Grant
I cannot emphasize this statement enough. Unclear rules and sporadic reinforcement breed insecurity in children. Insecurity breeds behavior problems and anxiety.
Make rules and, with love and grace, enforce them and hold your children accountable. This can and will change the atmosphere in your home. It will reduce some of the chaos and allow harmony. Make it fun and use positive reinforcement to foster the right atmosphere. This will motivate your kiddos to want to maintain the boundaries and rules.
Love Hard
And last but not least, LOVE makes a house a home. When our families feel our love and support from us through a warm hug, a word of encouragement, a grace-filled response, and a listening ear this says LOVE. Loving them this way can point your children to God by showing them a glimpse of God’s character. 1 Peter 4:8 reminds us how to love and what it can do.
The AWE Person
In the book Doing Life With Your Adult Children, the author refers to his mom as an AWE person. Affectionate. Warm. Encouraging. I want to be this kind of person. Wouldn’t the world be a great place if we all found a way to be an AWE person?
You, mama, are your child’s biggest cheerleader and their biggest fan. I cannot talk about making a house a home without that. It is important to point out that some people shy away from boundaries, rules, and discipline because it is hard.
Yes, it is hard, and I get that sometimes you are tired. However, with God’s help, you can do it. Remember, it will be worth the effort and hard work. Children thrive in the midst of boundaries and expectations. However, it is important to note that the tender touches of love and grace balance each other out.
These 6 steps will move you closer to that warm, cozy, loving home that “making home” is all about. I wrote these words a few years back about home.
“It is about a feeling of warmth and coziness, a smell, a feeling when you walk in the door. Home is a peace-filled place where harmony lives. It is an open door where family and friends want to be.” -kim grant
God is a huge part of our home and lives with us. Being together is fun. It’s about being thankful, having meals together, and making memories. Fun and laughter live in our home. It is about boundaries, instruction, and discipline. Grace and forgiveness abound. It is about music and movies. Home is a place we surround ourselves with people we love and meaningful things that depict who we really are. Home is love.”
Our homes are our havens. It is where we feel safest, where we feel loved, and where we love to be. Being organized, having distinct smells around our home, establishing traditions, fostering a warm environment, having a family identity, and loving hard, is a great place to start!
My prayer is that you find these steps helpful in making your house a home. I am praying for you daily as you do the hard work of creating a warm, cozy, inviting, joyful, fun, peace-filled, loving home for your family.
Much Love~Kim 💗
LINKED BLOG POSTS:
Chocolate Chip Cookies: A Family Tradition
