Travels With My Son

To me home-making comprises the various ways we personalise our homes, creating safe, calm and inspiring spaces, whether through full scale renovating, DIY projects, decorating or simply organising – not to mention gardening and landscaping (hard landscaping yourself is no joke, and something I’ll be sharing about here).  

Creating these calm and inspiring spaces is so beneficial to our overall wellbeing, but from experience I’ve found it can also be incredibly significant when we’re faced with grief, as well as other challenges and difficult seasons in our lives. 

Making our home and garden my favourite and safest places in the world has been instrumental to weathering the storms of life – from lockdowns to world-shaking losses – and helping me move from simply surviving to living what I would consider a good life, full of both joy and grief. Our home is so significant to my sense of self and how I exist in the world that my son’s uninhabited nursery has, perhaps surprisingly, become my favourite room in our house, and one of the safest feeling spaces in the world for me.

Our home and garden are both ongoing projects, so here I’ll share a mix of possibly impressive and perhaps not so impressive renovations, transformations, and DIY projects from an archive dating back to 2015, as well ongoing and future projects we’re yet to complete. There will be probably be some organising (organising is one of my main coping mechanisms), and no doubt some label maker cameos, because there’s nothing like a bit of labelling to bring a moment of joy to your (certainly my) day.