The Home Page | Hushing the House

This edition of The Home Page was originally emailed to subscribers on January 8, 2023. To receive Sarah Sinclair’s real estate newsletter in your inbox each Sunday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Happy 2023! We’ve got one week behind us and 51 more to go. If you’re feeling a little gob-smacked by the holidays and off your routine, it’s not too late to set the tone for the new year. You’ve still got time to renew and refresh and put some long term goals into action … whatever that might look like for you.

I’m taking it simple and easy. I want to plant something new in my yard and clear some clutter inside the house. I’ve got my eye on a passionfruit vine for the backyard fence:

For inside, I found an idea that piqued my interest over on The Nester. Blogger Myquillin calls herself a cozy minimalist and qualifies her love of all things home by declaring that she’d rather have a new pair of throw pillows than a new pair of shoes. Part of her credo is that “cozy doesn’t have to mean cluttered and minimal doesn’t have to mean cold.” I love this description.

For the start of the year, Myquillin presents the idea of quieting your house, which she explains as “decluttering backwards.” Sort of a mini Marie Kondo wherein you pick a room, remove all of the stuff, let it breathe and then put back only what brings you joy.

She gives us these ways to quiet your space — or “hush your house” — in five easy steps. As an example, here’s her living room before:

This looks pretty decluttered to me!  The next step is to take out all of the decor and let the room breathe for 24 hours. Here is the room during that quieted phase:

And the final step is deciding intentionally what you want to put back into the room and where. We don’t get to see the “after” of this room, and I don’t think we need to.

The philosophy is that we often add layer upon layer of stuff in our rooms, without remembering what they looked like bare. This process gives us an intentional pause in order to give the rooms the look and feel that we want to live in. Here’s Myquillin quieting live on instagram. She says we can accomplish this one room at a time, twenty minutes per room, with that important pause in between.

There are so many possibilities once you clear the clutter and take a new perspective. Just might work for the heart as well as the home, and I’m ready to try it.

While you’re taking that pause, take a look at this week’s issue for some news, cheer, and inspiration. Happy Sunday and cheers to 2023!

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