This is a bit of a departure from the more technical content I typically write about, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts on personal spaces and how they impact our lives.
I’m finishing up decorating the 5th (if my count is right) place I’ve lived in the past three years, and over the course of all those situations I’ve learned a lot about what I like and what I don’t. Beyond that though, I’ve learned that how my living and working spaces are decorated, cleaned, and organized has a massive effect on my mental health and productivity. Honestly this might be obvious knowledge for literally everyone except me, but personally I didn’t really realize this until maybe 6 months ago, and it’s only just now a coherent enough set of principles to write something about it. I’ve become a massively happier and healthier person just by putting effort and intention into keeping my spaces nice and decorating them to fit my personal vibes, and I want to share some of how I’ve done that here.
Living away from family for the first time in my life gave me a whole new level of agency over my living spaces and how they were laid out and decorated. I, like most naive freshmen, was really excited about this and decided to spend some time on making my dorm up all nicely right after I moved in. This being my first self-decorated space though, I of course had no clue what would actually work and it kinda wound up being a disaster. Besides the learning-by-failing I was doing with the decoration, the space itself was basically a 5-by-10-foot coffin I shared with another person, and there just wasn’t enough room for either of us to really get comfortable. Learning experience, but not particularly successful, so I moved out as soon as I could.
Ok, we’ll try again in my new apartment. I moved in there sophomore year, and the space itself was really great- high ceilings, relatively recent construction, modern fixtures, pretty much everything you’d look for in an apartment, right? I thought the same, but turns out a gigantic all white-and-grey landlord-special space isn’t super great when you’re a pair of broke college students with no money to properly furnish it. My roommate and I never really got enough things in there to make it feel homey, and the place was perpetually a gigantic empty echo chamber. Besides that, I had my desk in my bedroom again, which I’ve since discovered makes it basically impossible for me to disconnect from work. I did learn a fair amount about some basics I do like, though, including warm lighting and my general color palette for decor. That apartment is also where I gathered a lot of the furniture I’ve got in my current place.
By this point I’d kinda realized that my spaces stressing me out was a major trend. Partially it was the roommates- a string of bad decisions led to both of them and to be honest I ignored a lot of red flags there, but that’s a story for my therapist, not my blog. The main issue, really, was the fact that I wasn’t making these spaces my own or taking care of them properly. Frankly I didn’t feel stable enough in them to make major changes, and with roommates I couldn’t control much outside my bedroom anyway. This led to all the places I was living feeling more like a hotel than a home, and I was never really able to settle in anywhere. Clearly not ideal when you’re trying to manage anxiety. To add to it, I’m really a very clean person, but roommates making a mess of the place and my general detachment from things as a whole meant there was always some low-level cluttering going on. Very stressful if I’m honest, and definitely not what helps me feel at home. I resolved that my next apartment would be different, and that I’d set aside the budget and time to make sure I built a space I was proud of.
One of the major things I did to fix this problem was deciding to live alone in my new place. I had to go slightly further from my university to afford it, but it’s paid dividends a million times over. Some people do really well with roommates, but I’m definitely more introverted and having a space where I can go to be left alone is huge for me. Living alone also means that I don’t have to get anyone’s approval to set things up the way I want, I just do it. That level of freedom wasn’t something I’d ever had before, and it fully opened the door to let me put my learning into practice.
I knew making the space feel warm and inviting was important to me, so that was the first thing I focused on. An easy win there was replacing the lighting with Hue bulbs, but to add to it I made pretty conscious choices about my furniture and decorations. The rug in my living room as well as all the couch cushions are warm earth-tones and as much of the furniture as I could get away with is darker wood, which has done loads for making the place feel more “homey” and less like a museum, which was a major problem in past spaces. I also chose similar earth-tones for the bedroom, so there’s coordination throughout, and my most frequently visited rooms feel incredibly warm and inviting.
The layout was also a big deal for this one. I was downsizing significantly in the new place- I owned most of the furniture from the old 2-bed, and this place is about 2/3 the square footage, so I had to sell a lot of stuff and even then things were a bit tight. I was able to get creative and make the space feel adequately filled without being overcrowded, though. The other biggest thing I did for myself layout-wise was moving my desk into the living room instead of the bedroom. That did two major things in one pass: firstly, it forces me to keep my workstation clean because if people come over they’re definitely seeing any mess I’ve got going on. Secondly, and probably most importantly, it keeps my resting area completely separate from my working area. I work from home, and between schoolwork and my job, I really need to be able to disconnect from it all in the evenings. Keeping my desk far from my bed accomplishes that extremely well.
I put a lot of effort into my kitchen in this new place as well. I love to cook, it’s one of the things that relaxes me most (I’ll probably write another blog on just that pretty soon) and making sure my kitchen is inviting and a low-friction place to work is critical to my enjoyment of cooking. Previous spaces had been klunkily laid out and really not all that enjoyable to spend time in, and I decided I needed to make that a thing of the past here. I employed Adam Savage’s ideas of first-order retrievability to accomplish that (you should watch his videos on the subject over on Tested, they’re really informative). This is a system I like to use in any workshop I design, and to me the kitchen is just a type of workshop for food. This system grants me quick access to all my equipment, makes it easier for me to get into a flow state, and has actually probably saved me hundreds of dollars in Doordash I didn’t order because the kitchen is a place I actually want to be now.
Continuing from the kitchen, I put a similar amount of effort into my actual workshop in the new apartment. Like I said it’s pretty small, so I don’t have an entire room to dedicate to just a shop, it’s actually set up at the bar counter my kitchen has. Working in such a limited space was definitely a challenge, but I managed to fit everything in while still giving myself enough storage to keep mid-project mess to a minimum and maintain first-order retrievability for all my critical tools. I’m actually quite proud of how it turned out, and I might write something in the future on my workshop philosophy.
Last but certainly not least is all the art I’ve got on my walls. In a rented space you can’t really paint, so the only way to personalize your walls is hanging things for the most part. I’m a pretty active photographer, and a lot of what’s up in my apartment is photos I took myself. Pictures at the Colorado-Utah and California-Nevada borders hang above my bed, a sunrise shot at FAR sits in my living room, and there are a plethora of 4x6” portraits of my friends in various places. I’ve also got prints and paintings from some artists I like. It might seem like a small thing, but having art (and particularly my own art) on the walls has really helped make this a much happier space to be in. I particularly love that collection of friends’ portraits I mentioned. It sits in my living room so I see it every day, and I can’t express how important it is to have something like that to remind yourself of fond memories. On shitty days, sometimes you gotta remind yourself of the good stuff.
Wow, big wall of text. I could write on this forever frankly, because I’ve learned so goddamn much about myself and how I operate by figuring out the type of space I want to live in. I think the big takeaway, though, is just to take the time to get to know yourself and your needs in a living space. You’ll most definitely stumble a few times (or a lot), but it’ll be so incredibly worth it in the end. Having this space set up the way I do has made my life so much better in so many ways, and it’s turned my apartment from a place I sleep into a place I genuinely love being. You might discover you want things set up the way I do, you might find out my ideas don’t work for you at all and you need something completely different- it doesn’t really matter as long as whatever you make is uniquely yours.
Dedicate whatever time you can spare and money you can afford to making your house a home. It’ll pay for itself a thousand times over in mental health and productivity.