Welcome Home

Photograph by Dan Bartz

Welcome to Reside online, a blog committed to centering life around home and the how-to’s of creating an atmosphere that supports your lifestyle. It’s been 4 years since graduating college, marrying my teenage love, and moving out on our own. 4 jobs and 4 apartments later, I have found that what keeps us grounded is making a home wherever we are that reflects who we are, energizes us at the start of a new day, and envelops us when we collapse in the front door at the workday’s end. And, oh, those blessed weekends of sleeping in or rising early to enjoy a cup of coffee and a good book and entertaining friends for dinner or for an impromptu afternoon. So much of who we are and what we are able to accomplish each day is born out of how we live. We work hard, but our life does not stem from our jobs. Our life grows out of  the place where we let our hair down, kick off our shoes, and enjoy.

I was particularly inspired not too long ago when my loving and supportive husband sent me a link to an article in an e-mail that read, “You should read this: I think its your calling!” That article was from OregonLive.com about a movement of “Radical Homemakers” in Portland, Oregon. You can read it here. The idea of making deliberate decisions to choose domesticity for the quality of life that it offers was a huge piece to a puzzle I’d been trying to put together over the years. That puzzle is the relationship between life and home.

Furthermore, we have had so many opportunities to entertain guests in our home and so many people have complimented us strictly on the “homey-ness” of it. I hope to be able to share how we make that happen. Though my education and experience as an interior designer has definitely helped, creating aesthetic beauty in the place where I live is only a part of the bigger picture. In their book, Guide to Easier Living in 1950, Russel and Mary Wright, lifestyle entrepreneurs of the late 1920’s captured the essence of living beautifully when they wrote, “Good informal living substitutes a little headwork for a lot of legwork. It doesn’t need wealth, but it does take thought, some ingenuity and resourcefulness, and more than a little loving care to create a home that is really your own.” From within this blog I hope to share my insights on how I make home, MY home. I invite you to join me in exploring. Welcome home…