Making Your Home Into Somewhere You Want to Be
When you make the decision to become a stay at home mom, you might not realize exactly what this entails. It can be a joyous, wonderful experience, as you forge precious memories with your children that you’ll be able to treasure for years to come. However, it can also be tiring, and you can end up feeling a little trapped between the four walls of your home. After all, being a stay at home mom means doing just that – staying at home. Staying at home for quite a long time! Your home will become the absolute center of your life, and it’s important that you feel happy there. A cluttered, drafty home with problems that snag at your eye everywhere you look will get old far quicker than a home that you love!
So, the first step in being a stay at home mom is making your home into somewhere you want to spend a lot of time, because that’s exactly what you’ll be doing! The actions you take to realize this goal will vary, from designating certain rooms for certain activities, redecorating, organizing, and even doing proper building work. However, once you have completed as many of these tasks as you need, you’ll find yourself not only enjoying your time as a stay at home mom but never wanting to leave the house at all!
The Basics
First of all, it’s important to make sure the basics are all in order. This is true for any home – no one wants to live through winter without heating, for example – but it’s particularly the case for stay at home moms. You don’t have the time or energy to worry about boiler problems and electricity supply alongside all the other responsibilities of bringing up young people into the world. For this reason, ensuring your basic amenities are solidly in order is one of the main ways to decrease stress and take some of that valuable weight off your shoulders. Are you with an electricity supplier you can trust? Are your pipes creaking and leaking? These are little niggles to fix right away before they can get any worse.
A Room for You
As a stay at home mom, your life will start to revolve around your children. This can be wonderful, but also at times overwhelming. That is why creating a personal space just for yourself is vital. This room can be anything you need: an office, a chill-out zone, a reading room – its only defining feature is that it’s a place for you, and you alone. No children, and possibly not even your partner. If you have spent all day with the kids, when your partner gets home from work, the ability to have an hour in a space all to yourself is absolutely key to your mental wellbeing. So yes, dive into being a stay at home mom with all your enthusiasm, but make sure to keep a space for yourself amidst all the chaos.
Natural Light
The acronym SAD stands for Seasonal Affective Disorder, and it basically means that people get depressed when they don’t see enough sunshine. Even if this doesn’t affect you in an extreme way, natural light is still important to your mental and physical health, exposing you to the vitamin D you need for energy and focus. If your house is a bit stuff, without much natural light making its way in, over time this can start to feel claustrophobic, leading you to stop enjoying your time at home. Combat this by finding ways to let more natural light into your home, whether that’s through cleaning your windows, installing new glass doors, or using mirrors to reflect what light there is. If you have space and funds, a conservatory extension is also an incredible way to create an entire room open to the light, so you can get your daily dose of sunshine whenever you need it.
A Home to Be Proud Of
For somewhere that you spend so much time, it will become even more important to feel proud of your home, like it is a place you want to show off. This can be achieved through interior decoration and style, however, it also feels amazing when the outside of your home is just as impressive! You want to feel that smug satisfaction that anyone passing on the street outside might be envious of where you get to live all day. The state of your windows and doors can have a huge effect here, as there’s nothing less pleasing than dirty and falling-apart casements. It may be worth installing new windows from somewhere like Universal Windows Direct – or you can simply get a powerwash and make sure the exterior of your home is as sparkling as possible. Or both!
Living Plants
In case you hadn’t already heard, houseplants are officially the number one way to take your home to the next level. Now, your first reaction might be to think, really? Don’t you have enough on your plate without having to remember to water the plants? However, weekly watering is a small price to pay for oxygenated air, effortlessly beautiful rooms, and a way to teach your children about responsibility and looking after things that are rather less involved than getting a kitten! Houseplants also come in many shapes and sizes, and you can fairly easily pick hardy varieties that don’t need so much care and attention. Fill your home with living plants, and feel the calmness and benefits they bring.
Organizational Tricks
Your home could be the most beautiful, stylish, brilliant place in the world, and it would count for exactly nothing if you don’t have an organization system in place. You’ll be surprised how quickly children can create a mess – sometimes it feels like you can turn your back for a second and suddenly the room has exploded behind you – and you feel like you spend your whole life simply cleaning up after them. This job can be made a whole lot easier and quicker by instituting some simple but effective organizational tricks. Make sure you have lots of spacious, well-labeled, easy access storage boxes, so you have somewhere to quickly throw toys that will get them off the floor. Good organization for stay at home moms doesn’t have to be complicated, but simple and effective. Giving yourself rules and places for various objects can save yourself valuable ‘brain energy’, allowing you to enjoy your home and all its benefits!
Safety First
Here’s a tip if you’re still looking after very young children or babies. Chances are, you spend a lot of time worrying that they’ll find a way to hurt themselves whilst you’re looking in the other direction. However thoroughly you have baby-proofed your home, making sure it’s free from trailing wires and dangerous items in low places, you’re always concerned you’ll have missed something. It gets even trickier when they start crawling, and you’re even paranoid you’ll trip over them whilst cooking and holding a chopping knife. Get rid of these fears by kitting your house out to put safety first. Baby gates can be an amazing way to keep toddlers out of certain rooms if you know that a potentially dangerous activity will be happening, such as cooking or anything with scissors.
The Garden
When it comes to staying at home, your garden can become a hugely valuable change of scenery, a way to escape into the outside world without ever leaving your front door. It can also become a playground, a world for your kids to explore and play within, where you can keep an eye on them whilst letting them get their hands dirty. If you want to make your home into a place you love to be, the garden (or any outdoor space) can form a major part of that. After all, no one wants to sit out and relax amidst weeds and an old broken patio! If you can devote some time to gardening this can be a very therapeutic activity, otherwise, it’s definitely worth getting the professionals in to create your very own oasis.
Keeping Clean
Just as your organization will become vitally important, so will cleaning. Keeping your home clean and hygienic as a stay at home mom can almost feel like a full time job. It’s incredibly easy to lose track and let certain areas fall by the wayside, gathering dust and making you feel like you’re living in squalor, even if you definitely are not! Creating a rota for yourself to tick off cleaning tasks is a fantastic way to keep track and break down the cleaning into small, manageable jobs. Ticking them off can also be very satisfying. When your kids get older, this can also form a useful baseline to start giving them their own chores by adding them to the rota. Making sure your home is clean can really make a huge difference when it comes to your own feeling of wellbeing as a stay at home mom.