Nourish Mama by Sherry Rothwell
Nourish Mama, a nutritional program by Sherry Rothwell

Time to move or simply rearrange the furniture?

 

I tend to be a bit of a gypsy. The truth is, since my son was born 10 years ago, our family of four has moved 10 times from Manitoba to the west coast and back again.

I have had this ‘thing’ that happens in November when the snow starts to fall, and I suddenly feel ‘possessed’ to move (don’t judge me, we live in Winterpeg)!

This year the weather has been pretty mild, so I didn’t bother much with that thought.

Instead of moving, I decided to move the furniture (and it just happened naturally as I followed my desire to clear space and honestly assess what is working and isn’t working in my life).

Really, a simple shift in furniture can turn out to be pretty life transforming.

One specific thing that made moving the furniture so profound for us this time, is that I looked at the rooms in my home and the furniture and choose to see them outside of their ‘normal’ context.

There were two things about the way that my home was set up that just wasn’t working for me:

We have this one of a kind, made by a real person beautiful dining room table (in the photo), but there are two problems that it caused in the flow of my everyday life.

1) I used it as my desk. Imagine this, it is time for dinner and there I am pushing my work to one side of the table with barely enough room for my family to sit down comfortably. So everyday, I would have this sinking thought about having no space for my work and it taking up the space that I intended to be sacred with my family.

2) I originally purchased the table as an investment in intentional community. We used to live in a home with other families and we needed a table that we could all enjoy sitting at comfortably together. While we still have a vision of that table being used in a common space in an intentional community, it is not serving our family of four. This is on account of it’s rectangular shape. When 4 people sit on the end of it, it doesn’t feel balanced. Energetically, it makes one want to eat and get up as soon as possible. So we got a lovely round table and made the big table my desk! That’s right, save for when I have clients coming to my house, I can simply leave everything that I am working on spread out, so I can see it all at once!

Another simple shift that made a profound difference is that we not only switched the use of furniture, but we also rearranged our house unconventionally. We put the living room in the kitchen, the office in the living room and the main eating area in the dining room.

In the process, we also moved my daughter’s play space into the main floor bedroom (it used to take up most of our living room). Oh my word, the toys mostly even stay in there now!

I have to tell you that when our house was set up conventionally, it was really important to me that the children’s play space was in the middle of the living room because I wanted my kids to be close to me while I was in the kitchen.

BUT this new way that we set up means that while the playroom isn’t close to the kitchen, it is close to my work space -meaning that the children are playing close by where I spend most of my time anyway!

So not only does it feel like we are living in a new house, but something about the way we rearranged things, makes our home feel more spacious (and it is way easier to keep clean)!

The one thing that I want to share about why I think these shifts have so profoundly impacted the flow of our life and our home, is that we looked at our lives and our space ‘outside of the box’. We rearranged our home to suit us, rather than simply putting furniture in rooms the way that someone else decided makes sense.

And really, when you think about it, how could one design concept fit all people?

So if your home is making you feel like it was made for someone else, maybe it is time for some unconventional moving of the furniture so that your home reflects you (not the other way around)!

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