Hey guys. I’m so excited to be back with you today. Today, we are talking all about home. Now I know you may be wondering what home has to do with learning how to thrive and find purpose as a military spouse. But guys, our home is a huge part of our lives. And for those of us who move frequently, having a space that feels like home is even more important, especially if we are stay at home parents or we work from home.

[00:00:31] So today we’re talking all about what it looks like to turn a house into a home, even when it’s not a place we love . Or we don’t think it’s the best fit for our family. So let’s dive in and talk about all these things on today’s show.

Now, guys, I love hearing from you. I love hearing where you listened from, how you found the show, and what you are wanting to learn more about. I got a message the other day. Someone was doing their cross-country drive to their new duty station and was looking for podcasts to listen to and found the milspouse mastermind show.

[00:02:03] I love hearing stories like that. And you know what happens when you go and share our podcast, it helps more military spouses find this community. So, if you are wanting to make an impact in the lives of other military spouses, then please go onto iTunes and leave a review for the show.

[00:02:26] It’s super quick and simple to do. Just click on the iTunes link, scroll down to the bottom where it says. Ratings and reviews. You can click the stars and then type whatever you want to share about what you have learned or gotten out of this show. It just helps us continue to get the word out and gives me good feedback and helps me create even better content for you.

[00:02:54] Let’s dig into talking about turning your house into a home. Now I know we are smack dab in the middle of PCS season, and I know so many people have had a challenging time this year. I have friends whose belongings have been held up because of lack of movers and lack of drivers. Friends who are struggling to find homes to buy. There are houses selling for way over asking price, long wait lists to get into base housing and families having to settle for less than ideal homes, because rental prices have skyrocketed.

[00:03:25] It can be frustrating to be in a home that you don’t love, or that isn’t in the best part of town, or that you don’t feel like meets the needs of your family. But as I so often say, what happens next? We can dwell on the things that we don’t love, or we can choose a more productive response.

[00:03:54] Last year, our family moved from a spacious 3000 square foot house with big picture windows and tons of natural sunlight. We had five bedrooms, a large master bath. We had walk-in closets, we had a basement with a game closet, where we could store a bunch of the kids’ toys. We had so much storage space. It was insane.

[00:04:20] And then we moved to a home on base, roughly half the size. Our 1950s base house. I like to call it our bunker because it is made to withstand typhoons. It’s exactly that. A 1950s house. In fact, it’s so old that we don’t even have a carport. Yes. We just have a parking spot on the street where we can park our cars.

[00:04:48] And I’m sure it’s taking great care of our cars, with all of the salt water rain that we get on a daily basis. But you know, it is what it is. I went from a three-car garage to a parking space, not what I had in mind for protecting my vehicle. This is life. I no longer have a walk-in closet. I think it’s funny that some people really talk about when you starting podcasting, a great place to go podcast is in your closet, because you get a lot of sound absorption.

[00:05:18] You get better quality sound, but the truth is I’m a military spouse. I live in a 1950s house and I don’t have a walk-in closet. So I’ve traded it in my gorgeous large master bath and walk-in closet for, um, the tiniest closet I think I’ve ever had. I work out of my bedroom, just have a desk beside my bed.

[00:05:40] And again, it is what it is. But this isn’t to complain about my 1950s base house. It’s to talk about how we all go through situations where we’re living in a space that isn’t necessarily a space that we love, or that isn’t ideal. We have, over the course of the last several years, lived in several different homes and rentals, and I’ve learned several things along the way.

[00:06:10] Taking a house and making it a home, no matter what the house looks like, no matter how big or small it is, and no matter whether it looks like the house of my dreams or something far from it. So regardless of how you currently feel about your house, let’s talk about a few things you can do to make it feel more like home.

[00:06:33] Now, before I get into some tips for you, some practical ways that you can tangibly change the look and feel of your space. I want to pause for a second and just give a big shout out to Kayla Maltese, who is a fantastic photographer. If you look at the cover art of this podcast, I am. In my 1950s home and you know what? It looks like a place that I would want to live. Because hello, I do live there.

[00:07:04] But I just want to show you that it isn’t the space itself. You know, it might be a 1950s bunker, but I can still make it look and feel like home. So I will try to drop a few more images of places that we have lived on our website, in my blog, so that you can get an idea of what you can do no matter what the space itself looks like.

[00:07:36] Now, when we talk about decorating our home, there really is this idea of a continuum. On the one end there is doing absolutely nothing to your space. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have people that take a rental and they go all out to completely transform it. If you’ve joined some of these decor groups on Facebook, or you’ve seen somebody post on Instagram or on Pinterest, people can completely transform their space by replacing lighting fixtures with their own lighting fixtures.

[00:08:06] You can put up a black splash, some removable wallpaper. You can cover tile floors. You can cover the countertops. You can design an accent wall. You can do a lot to make the space look and feel unique. That takes a lot of time and energy and effort.

[00:08:32] So on the one end of the spectrum is doing nothing, on the other end is completely transforming your home. And a lot of this is going to come down to how long you’re going to be somewhere and how much time you have to devote to transforming your home. And how much you actually want to transform your home. Somewhere along the spectrum is where you’re going to land.

[00:08:56] The important thing to take away from what we’re talking about today is that you want to create a space that reflects who you are as a family. And really just has this essence of this is a home and not just a place we sleep at night. So what we’re going to do today is just talk about a few simple things you can do to make your space look and feel more like home.

[00:09:24] So the first tip I have is to use paint. Paint can work wonders. Let’s talk about paint for a second. It’s easy to say paint takes time. I think that’s probably the biggest obstacle to painting your house, but it can make a huge difference. When you look at the way that our current house looks like before we painted, and after we painted, it made such a difference in how the space itself feels.

[00:09:49] Plus our base house had this high gloss off-white standard beige color and while it’s not terrible, it doesn’t give this sense of home. And so just painting just a neutral gray color with less of a sheen, made a huge difference.

[00:10:19] Now, how do I know if I should paint and how much I should paint and what I should paint? It totally depends on a number of factors, but the biggest thing I will say is this. How long are you going to be in a space? My general rule is if we think we are going to be somewhere for at least two years, then we will consider painting.

[00:10:41] If we’re going to be somewhere less than that, we typically don’t bother with painting. The unique thing about living on base is, with past rent houses, we did not have the stipulation that we had to paint it back to the original color. With base housing, there is a chance that if they don’t tear a house down after we move out, then we will have to paint it back.

[00:11:05] Because of that, we decided to just paint our living room and our dining room, which are kind of the main living areas that way. More defined. And if we have to paint it back, it’s less time consuming than trying to repaint the whole house. But if you’re going to be somewhere for at least two years, then I would highly recommend painting at least your main living area or doing some kind of wallpaper or something, just to make the space feel a little more like you, a little more like home.

[00:11:37] The second thing you can do that will make a huge difference. And too many people just say, oh, this isn’t vital to my space, but I will tell you, it adds so much more character to your space and that is curtains. Curtains, curtains, curtains. There’s just something about fabric that really changes the nature and the character of a space.

[00:12:01] So now, if you have been a military spouse, military family for a while, then over time you have hopefully made a curtain box. But if you are new to the military spouse lifestyle, then I would say, go ahead and start this now. So what is a curtain box? So when you move into a house, you have so many windows and they’re going to be a certain height.

[00:12:28] And you get your curtains and seal your windows, and then you move to the next house and the layout is completely different. And what curtain do you need for that house? What goes with the layout of that house or the decor of that house? Or if you’re sticking with the wall color that is already there.

[00:12:45] It may not be the same curtains that work in the next house. Right. So you get those curtains. Do you get rid of the ones that you used in the first house? Nope, because it will probably work in the third house or the fourth house. So you have this whole box of curtains that you’ve collected of different styles, different lengths that you might not use in one house, but you will use in a future house.

[00:13:09] The great thing about curtains is that they don’t have to be expensive. You can get neutral white curtains from Ikea, totally affordable, and they will work in so many different rooms. So many different setups. Now, in my kids’ rooms, we have blackout curtains because it was important to me, especially as they are young, to be able to block out the light for rest time in the afternoon.

[00:13:35] So, because we have blackout curtains in that room and I did not want to invest in lots of different lengths. We have lived in multiple houses where the curtains did not reach the floor. The first house that we bought it for, it worked perfectly. The next house had really high windows. And I was just okay with having curtains in their bedrooms where they didn’t reach the floor. It’s a kid’s room.

[00:13:55] Most people aren’t going to go back there and see it. And if they do, they probably have kids and understand that lifestyle. So sometimes you’re going to have curtains that don’t go all the way to the floor. Depending on how long you’re going to be somewhere, it may be something that you want to trade out those curtains, or you may just live with it if you’re going to be there for just a couple of years. But all that to say, curtains can make a huge impact in the look and feel this space.

[00:14:25] So if you will just paint a wall and hang up some curtains, your space is already going to look so much more like home. The next thing I would say is, hang the pictures on the walls.

I see this happen a lot for people who are only going to be somewhere for a short period of time. They say, oh, I won’t bring my decor, or I won’t bother to hang the pictures on the wall because we’re only going to be here for less than a year. But I will tell you if you will just take the time to hang some pictures on the wall, it will make a huge difference in how you feel about a particular space. You don’t have to have fancy, heavy, expensive wall art. You can get plenty of lightweight pieces and hang them with things like command strips, or like the little hooks that go into the wall that only leave a really small opening.

[00:15:23] I don’t know what you call those. Just do a picture hanging hook search on Amazon, and I’m sure they will pop up. But there are plenty of easy ways to hang wall art that won’t leave huge marks, that won’t leave you with holes to fill when it’s time to leave. But it will make your space look and feel much more like a home than just a place that you are living for temporary amount of time.

[00:15:51] I even had friends that were coming out here because this is what. We’ll probably only be here a couple of years, but they were like, Hey, I’m moving to an island. I just won’t bring all of my home décor stuff. And then they got out here and said, hey, this space just feels like I’m living in a bunker. It doesn’t feel like home.

[00:16:11] I’m so thankful that we brought all of our home decor stuff, because it really does make a difference in both how the space looks, and how you feel about living in that location. You can hate the location that you’re in, but you can still, when you walk in the door, you feel that sense of home.

[00:16:33] If the place is a place you enjoy being, that’s going to impact how you view the entire assignment. How you view the location that you’re living in, can be impacted just by how you feel about the space that you are currently calling home.

Marie Condo in her book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, talks about how we set up our space, how we organize our space, how we feel about our space, and how that impacts the rest of our life.

[00:17:12] Taking care of and cultivating a sense of home is so important as part of our overall health and well-being. And this is a little bit off topic, but that’s why the growth wheel that I created has 10 elements that make up our life. All of these elements affect how we feel, whether we feel a sense of balance, whether we feel a sense of wholeness and fulfillment, or whether we feel like something is off and something is negatively affecting our lives. Home is a piece of that. Home is part of what creates this life of fulfillment, enjoyment and contentment in our lives.

[00:17:48] So we’ve talked about how paint can help. We’ve talked about hanging up the curtains. We’ve talked about hanging pictures on the wall. The fourth tip that I will give you is to intentionally buy pieces of furniture that will work for multiple arrangements and choose pieces of furniture that go together.

[00:18:19] We have bought a ton of furniture in our journey, but we have never bought everything at the same time. Usually with every move we add one or two new pieces and we get rid of one or two. That’s because furniture was not made to move all the time.

[00:18:44] And the more that you move it, the more that it starts to fall apart. Or we just decide, Hey, this isn’t working for us anymore. This is something that we’ve had for a long time. It’s time to replace this item. Or we just want to replace it with something we love and is a little more functional and better meets the needs of our family in this season.

[00:19:07] So for us, we love sectionals, but we have never purchased one, because we’ve lived in so many different houses with so many different living room arrangements, where a sectional just wouldn’t work well in the space. For now, we just have a couch and a love seat, because it is so much more versatile and we can use it in so many places.

[00:19:30] It’s not the couch of my dreams. It’s just a neutral couch and a neutral love seat that we can use in many different houses and decorate it in a different way to make it feel like home. We’ve added a TV stand, we’ve added a coffee table and we’ve added a bench to our living room set up. And all of these have been added at different points and in different homes in our military career, but they all cohesively fit together.

[00:19:58] You don’t have to spend a lot of money on furniture that looks great and is functional. We’ve gotten plenty of pieces of furniture from Wayfair, from overstock.com. They work, they’re functional and they look good together, even though most of our furniture was purchased at target. The second thing to think about when we’re talking about furniture is to have a plan for how, and when you’re going to replace a piece of furniture. If you are just starting out, you are not really replacing.

[00:20:35] You’re just building up all of the pieces that you’re going to want in your home. But the more that you move, the longer that you’re in, the more you’re going to have to think about a plan for what needs to be replaced. So for us in our last house, we knew that our bed frame was probably not going to make it through another move.

[00:20:57] It had been put together a few too many times. It had pieces of plywood that were helping hold it in place. And we knew it was not going to make the move. Because of COVID and because of all of the shipping delays, we were not able to order a new bed frame that would arrive at our house in time before we had to pack up and put all of our belongings on a boat.

[00:21:21] So now we’ve pieced together a bedroom set. We have a bed frame that was originally in our guest bedroom, and that is functional. We have a new headboard that we were able to fit with that, and that is working for us for. Also when we moved, we got rid of our breakfast table, because A) we only had one dining room in this house and we had two dining rooms in the last few houses that we’d been in and B) because it only fit four people. And we now need table that fits five.

[00:21:48] So we have our current dining room table, which we got long before we had kids. It’s not really built to withstand the destructive nature of children, in a dining room, eating three meals a day. It’s starting to fall apart. So we know that that table is probably not going to make it through another move.

[00:22:09] And so we’re already thinking ahead to when we get to our next location, we’re going to have to have funds set aside to purchase a new dining room table. So it’s important to think through how you can collect pieces over time that fit together cohesively and how you can plan for that. What pieces are going to need to be replaced, and how you can set aside funds to replace them with functional pieces of furniture.

[00:22:34] You don’t have to invest in the high-quality pieces. I would love to have the couch one day with the high-performance fabric. That’s not feasible right now, but I am constantly thinking ahead, planning ahead and preparing for when our furniture is going to need to be replaced, and how we can add in new pieces of furniture, without it feeling like nothing in our house goes together.

[00:23:01] And then one bonus tip when it comes to furniture, if you know, you’re going to be in a house that needs a specific piece of furniture, but it’s probably not going to work or you won’t need it in the future, look at Facebook Marketplace. Look for resale shops or some way that you can get furniture that you can use, but that you’re not planning to spend a lot on, because you’re probably not going to keep it for the long term.

[00:23:28] In our last house, we had this landing space at the top of the stairs. It looked a little bit empty, but I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money to fill the space, because it’s a very unique space. So I found a great futon on Facebook Marketplace that worked for that space, that made it look put together and lived in.

[00:23:48] We were able to resell that futon for basically the same price before we moved. So just think outside the box a little bit. What can you do to make a space feel and look like home, without wasting a bunch of money on something that you probably won’t use in the future, or that will not work well in a bunch of different layouts.

[00:24:11] Now that fifth tip for practically making your space look like home is using rugs and adding home decor pieces that reflect who you are. Who you are as a couple or a family ,and things that make that space look put together and feel like home. Rugs can add a whole lot of texture and character to a space.

[00:24:38] Plants. If you’re like me and you have a black thumb, just invest in fake plants. Plus you don’t know how they will pack it, and it may or may not make it to your next location without getting damaged. Most of my smaller fake plants have done fine with the moves. If I get fake flower arrangement, sometimes those don’t survive the move quite so well.

[00:25:02] You can do things that just add that pop of texture or color to your space. And I guess the last thing I would say about this is you can have a bunch of tiny things, it just ends up making the space look cluttered. Instead, invest in a few larger pieces or pieces that you know that you’re going to be able to use in multiple locations.

[00:25:29] We have a decorative bookshelf in living room that has moved from space to space, to space. The things that I buy to put on that bookshelf, I know I’m going to be able to use them in the next home, as long as the bookcase fits in the living room.

[00:25:49] Remember, bigger pieces instead of a bunch of little things, and what reflects who you are as a family and makes that space feel a little more like home.

And then the last thing to remember is at the end of the day, stuff is just stuff. And what matters more than how it looks, is doing the things that make it feel like home to you.

[00:26:14] Next week, we’re going to go more into how you really create this feeling of home. Beyond the tactile, what it looks like, how we create that feeling, those traditions, the things that make it feel like this is a space to call home, regardless of where it’s located. Regardless of whether we love the location, this is a place for our family that we feel safe. There is a sense of ownership and belonging there. What are some things we can do to help create that feeling.

[00:26:42] I hope this information was really practical and tangible to you in ways that you can make that space look like a place to call home for you and for your family and for everyone that steps inside your front door.

[00:27:07] Again, if you want to see some pictures of how we have made our 1950s bunker feel like home and what we’ve done to just create some character for it, simple things like paint, curtains. I put peel and stick wallpaper in my kitchen to create a backsplash. Just the things that you can do to create that home.

[00:27:32] If you have additional ideas of what you can do to make a space look and feel like home, I would love to hear about it. Just come pop it in the Facebook group, let us know what you’ve done. Show us a picture and let’s share some ideas of things we can do to create a space that looks like home, regardless of where it’s located or what the house itself looks like.

[00:27:54] As always you can find the links to everything available on the website or our Facebook group, in the show notes below, or by going to milspousemastermind.com. I hope you have a wonderful week and that you wake up each day knowing that you were made with and for a purpose. Until next week, may you live filled, fueled and full of joy.