It doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.

It’s been the tagline here for almost five years.   And I believe it’s true.

 

Does that mean I think a messy house can be beautiful?  Sometimes. But an overly messy house doesn’t usually meet my goals & purpose for my home so unfortunately, most of the time, that means I need to keep it on the tidy side.  Of course, you and I and your mother-in-law all have different definitions of what ‘messy’ means, but that’s another post.

Most of us are here at Nesting Place because we want to have a pretty house.  We enjoy beauty, we are on a quest for it, we seek it out, we LOVE being surrounded with the lovely.  There is nothing wrong with seeking out beauty.

But sometimes we take that to one of two extremes.

1. We over-buy, over-spend, over-decorate, over-worry and over-fret.  We have a cute, somewhat organized hoard tightly packed away calling our name. We are constantly trying the next DIY craze in our homes only to find that we still feel discontent when we look around.

Or

2. We are paralyzed, afraid of making a wrong decision and afraid of changing anything in our homes, even something as simple as changing a paint color that we hate.  We go out to buy one picture frame and come home empty-handed because deciding is impossible.  We have paint swatches taped to the wall (for months, even years) and stacks of framed photos behind the sofa for fear of making an extra nail hole. And then we still over-worry and over-fret.

Both of those tendencies seem to stem from one main issue.

Perfection.

We have been duped into believing that perfection is the ultimate goal for our homes.

There’s no such thing as a perfect house, at least not if you want to actually live there.  Clearly the magazines have run out of perfect homes to photograph, because they came here, to this house.  Where we live.   Maybe the perfect home is a myth.  Instead of striving for some kind of perfection, why not strive for those purposes we talked about here.

Because chasing perfection for our home is like chasing an empty promise that doesn’t even exist.  We get so caught up in trying to measure up to some pretend ideal that we don’t even realize that it isn’t even true.

if you are reading this via email, click here to come over to Nesting Place to watch the video it’s worth the click

Our perception of beauty is distorted. I know, it’s a Dove commercial but it captures what we are talking about.  Our search for real beauty in our lives, in our homes. We’ve raised our expectations so high for our home  that we’ve overlooked what Home was truly meant to be.  And oftentimes, we overlook the beauty that is.

 Still wondering what this is all about?

Related posts:

A Revolution

Power of the Imperfect

The Purpose of a Workspace

#idhtbptbb