About Emily

I read this article recently over on the New York Times blog: Living With Less. A Lot Less and it really got me thinking. How many of us can relate to what he experienced?

Not in an exact way – as we don’t all have multiple million dollar businesses to sell. But, we start out in our nice little home, then we start to make more money so we get a bigger home and we fill it with stuff, more stuff, and more stuff.

Then we realize we have all of this stuff we don’t need or want and instead of one boss at a job to pay for everything, we have two jobs – one that pays for everything, and another where our “boss” is the space we’ve chosen – all the room to fill, all the yard to take care of, all the house that needs our attention.

When my husband and I moved from our very roomy 2500 square foot Victorian in New York back in 2005 to a simple little 1500 square foot Florida home, we were forced to simplify. I thought, “This is amazing. We are so great at making our life so much easier – we have less stuff, we spend less money – we are awesome!”

Seven years later, I am not sure I feel the same way.
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By contributor Emily Walker of Remodeling This Life.

I am slightly embarrassed to admit that over the last few years of gutting and remodeling our home, I spent far too much of that time thinking that through building a newer, prettier home from the ugly shell we started with, that I was creating happiness.

With each shiny new fixture, new white cabinet, shiny new piece of tile floor, and transformation of each room from drab to fab, I thought that I was making happy for myself and my family. The truth is that no matter what the walls, floors, cabinets, or fixtures are made of, they aren’t what was making our family happy.

What makes a home happy is the people that are in it, the attitudes we come in the door with, and the simpler things that we can do to the space we call home each time we’re in it that don’t cost a thing.
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By contributor Emily Walker of Remodeling This Life.

It has been nearly 8 years since my family sold our nearly 3000 square foot, three story Victorian home with a big basement and lots of closets in New York. When we chose to put our home on the market and I put in my two-week notice at work, I had no idea the kind of journey we’d be on.

I knew that I wanted to be home with my baby and I knew that my husband was sick of the snow and cold. So, we made the most fly-by-the-seat of our pants move of our lives so far and gave up the grind of long work days, lots of bills, and more house than we needed, and chose to find a new path somewhere sunnier.

For months, we flailed around trying to figure out where we wanted to live, what we wanted to do with ourselves and how to find a simpler way of life. We lived with friends in Maryland, followed by living in a hotel for months in the town we have now settled down in on the coast of Florida.

The days were long, scary, and full of the unknown. The one thing we knew was that we wanted a smaller and simpler home and less to worry about in our lives. To get there, it took buying a really ugly, outdated fixer-upper, and spending 5 years transforming it into what we can proudly call home today.
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Written by contributor Emily Walker of Remodeling This Life.

For the last two weeks, my home was immaculate. When dishes got dirtied, they were immediately washed and put away. Laundry was folded and put away fresh and hot from the dryer.

There weren’t toys everywhere with only the three options of being picked up, tripped over, or stepped on; they were all in place at all times. There were no smudgy fingerprints to be wiped from walls and tables and the couch.

Every time I left my house and then returned, everything was just as I had left it. Clear counters, a coffee table I could set my coffee and feet on without having to shove 15 toys out of the way. Carpets that were still freshly vacuumed and dirt-free.

I will tell you the secret to the perfectly spotless, tidy living conditions which I lived in for two weeks…

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Written by contributor Emily Walker of Remodeling This Life.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately feeling frustrated with my home. I went back to working outside the home after six years, and as a result, went from having plenty of time in a day to make things just the way I wanted them in my home—to having just enough time to make things pretty good.

I’ve had to let go of perfection and be okay with pretty good. If the laundry is done and the kitchen is clean simultaneously, I am fine with there being toys everywhere (or at least I try really hard to be). I am not going to lie, it hasn’t been easy. Somehow, having kids right under my feet making art and toy messes zaps all my motivation to clean up. It feels like an uphill battle, and more than ever, it feels like if my home is anything, it’s not a simple one.

This morning, like many others, I spent some time grumbling inwardly (and a little bit outwardly, too) about how complicated it seems to just keep the living room clean for more than twenty minutes. The second a surface is cleared, it becomes a magnet for more stuff to get set there.

As soon as I clean the floors, someone tramples them with summer feet.

As soon as I get to the bottom of the laundry hamper, there is more thrown in.

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