The Lazy Genius Podcast - #49: The Lazy Genius Home

Episode Date: January 29, 2018

We often define our home by it's style, but that's only a piece of the puzzle and a dangerous place to start... unless you're ready to spend a million dollars at Target. In this episode, explore the three components of any home, no matter where you live or who you live with, and how naming them can enhance your life in significant ways. Mentioned in this episode and/or helpful thoughts on home: The Lazy Genius Guide to Cleaning the House Episode #7: Finding Your Home's Personality with Addie Jones The Cozy Minimalist by The Nester The Swap is available until the end of February 2018! This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. This is episode 49, the lazy genius home. We are all fortunate enough to have a home. So this conversation is relevant to all of us. And yet, our homes and our lives in them are so unique. It feels like an oversimplification to talk about home for all of us in the same way. That's why today in the playbook we're talking about the three main components of whatever home you choose and how understanding those those components and naming them for yourself will enhance your life in huge ways.

And since we'll spend the rest of the month talking about specific cleaning strategies for your home, starting from a broad 10,000 feet is a great way to begin that conversation. So let's dive in. Every home has three components. Style, spirit, and service. The style is how it looks. The spirit is how it feels. And the service is how it functions, how it serves you. Let's look at all three in detail,

and then after I'll share my answers from my own home to give you an example of kind of how it all works together. But first, can we talk about the order? What do we usually focus on first? Style, right? Totally style. We buy cute stuff at Target and Home Goods, and we try and recreate episodes of Fixer Upper in our living rooms, and are ultimately left with a room that looks like a fancy curated garage sale. Nothing feels like it has a purpose.

It can be so frustrating and really expensive. So if we start with the wrong thing, we will end up in the wrong place. So rather than trying to figure out our style and then kind of happen, upon the spirit and service later when we have time, we need to flip the order. First comes service. We must first name and believe in the purpose and function of our home. Second, comes spirit. What's the mood and the feeling within our walls? Then comes style. Because if we know how our home functions and how we want it to feel, our choices are almost made for us when it comes to style. So let's start with the main thing. Service.

I wish I could have come up with a better word that started with the S, but we'll go with it. You're probably shouting your ideas at me from your kitchen. Like, I know there has to be a better word than service, but it's fine. Okay, it does the job. How does your home serve you, the people who live with you and anyone who comes through your door? In other words, how does your home function? The answer to that might differ from how you want it to function and how it actually does, and we will get to that.

But let's look first at the basics. So what activities happen in your home? Eating, sleeping, hanging out, having people over, watching sports, reading, homework, exercise, crafts. The lists are varied and long, but we all share a good number of them. Okay. Now, are any of those activities vital to your home? Like, if any of them happened somewhere else outside of your home? would it be heartbreaking?

Like, okay, for example, a lot of people don't really eat in their homes and would be fine if they never did. They never had to. Having disposable income to eat out for most meals sounds awesome for some people and they do it. Not to me, though. Eating within these walls of my home is a primary function of its service. You might feel that way about exercising in your living room versus going to the gym. Watching movies on the couch as a family versus going to the gym.

versus going to the theater. Painting in your special attic space as opposed to a studio. Certain things really mean a lot more when they happen in your home. So recognizing those is a great place to start. And for the record, some things you might really long to do outside the home, like have that separate work or studio space, but time and money and life in general just don't allow that. No problem. Okay. If something matters to you, No matter where you want it to happen, let's work it into the way your home serves you if it needs to happen in your home now. Next, let's choose the top three activities we love experiencing in our home or that we can't experience anywhere else. Again, one of my is eating for sure.

The other two are having people over and just sitting around as a family, doing everything and nothing. I am not reinventing the wheel with these answers, y'all. but if I take those three things, those top three things, if you take your top three things, ask yourself if your home functions in a way that makes those a priority. And what other tasks or activities that you don't prioritize as much that don't really connect deeply to the function of your home are they getting in the way of what does? Here is a very oversimplified example, but will hopefully make sense. Okay, Sally. Sally grew up with the mother who sewed.

Sally is not me being secretive. Like, this is just a random person named Sally. Sally grew up with the mother who sewed. It was part of the fabric. Get it? Fabric. It's fine. Of the home.

So Sally's mom made the clothes and the curtains and the Halloween costumes, everything. Sally then internalized sewing as something that should be in her own home. when she had one. She knew how to sew. Of course, her mom taught her. She didn't find a whole lot of life from it, like maybe her own mom did. But in her first home, she set up the sewing machine, her mom bought her, the kind that folds up like a wooden side table. We had one of those growing up. And she put it in the living room in a prominent position so that it would be used and also seen by her mom when her mom came to visit. But what Sally really loves? Sally really loves watching movies with her friends.

Throwing big movie nights with fancy popcorn and lights out and all the things. It's one of her favorite things about having her own place. But there's no room for a big TV or even an extra chair because of the sewing table. See where I'm going

with this? Sowing and therefore the sewing table sewing doesn't really fit in the function of Sally's home. What she really wants. Space for cushy pillows and a bigger flat screen do. It is a fake and like I said it's a very simplified example but we so rarely take the time to identify how we want our home to function, how we want it to serve us and our people and then we find

ourselves frustrated that we can't do all the things we want because we've just fallen into some things by default. So choose your top three things and identify if you're giving them priority and how your home serves you. Also notice if priority is given to activities that don't actually matter so much. I'm looking at you, unused treadmill. Those things are enormous. All right. So, after service comes spirit. How does your home feel? How do you want it to feel? So many choices here. Calm, cozy, comfortable, inspiring, minimal, colorful and fun. Like you're in the mountains or at the beach or in Paris. There are so many forms your home's spirit. can take. But identifying how you want your home to feel is a beautiful gift to yourself in creating a

home you love. A few questions to ask yourself if you're having trouble. What do you love about being home when you return to it after a long day or a trip away? What do you love hearing other people say when they come in? What's the mood when you spend all day at home and are really glad you did? choose a word or two to capture the spirit of your home and I would encourage you to not create like totally separate words for the people who live in the home and then those who just visit try to stick with like one word two words or if you need to make them a little bit different that they do overlap because here's the thing I think you're sending yourself up for creating a home that isn't really you if you make your words too different um it might be more focused on being impressive than being

authentic. So if you find yourself wanting completely different words for yourself and then for those who visit, just stop and think for a second. Also, if you're having trouble coming up with them in general, your home spirit will probably be connected a bit to the way your home serves you. How it functions and how it feels are definitely friends. So use your home's purpose to guide you if you need to. And then knowing the spirit you desire will definitely be like such a marker, such a lighthouse and finding the third component. Style. This is the most tangible one, but also kind of the hardest in some ways. What's my style? We all feel a little handicapped in this question, right? But do you see how knowing the service and spirit of your home first, it will guide you to a style that feels more

authentically you? A trap we fall into is looking at photos in magazines or on Instagram and immediately thinking that what we're drawn to is the style, is the style that we want, when often the photo is communicating something deeper than style. It might communicate a spirit or a way of serving that really resonates with you, yet you're labeling it as style. So be wary of that when you see a photo or a room like in person that you love.

Do you love how it serves, the spirit it gives off? or simply how it looks. Aw isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces

can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. How something looks is important, sure. But when we lead with the purpose and the feel of our home, with the service and the spirit, how it looks is less important. And it also starts to make more sense together, like it's all more purposeful and connected. I think that you intuitively know your style.

And if you don't, there are lots of resources out there to help you. I will say that my absolute favorite is a course by my friend the Nestor called The Cozy Minimalist. I took it a couple years ago. Y'all, it was a straight game changer. Like, oh, so good. I will put a link in the show notes so you can check it out. I'm pretty sure it's not for sale right now, but she offers it at least once a year.

So you can at least sign up to get the word on when it's available again. I will put a link to it in the show notes. So you can head to the lazy genius collective.com slash lazy slash home to see that and all the other links from this episode that will help you gain some perspective on your home. Okay, so I would love to share how I see these three components in my own home to kind of give you an A to Z look at how all this works.

My home serves my family and my friends by being a place to hang out with no pretense or worry, emotionally or physically. I'll get to that. I want my home to have a spirit of welcome, cozy, cozy, and indestructibility. I want you to feel free to sink into a cushy couch, and if you spill on it, no big thing. If your kids come over to play with mine

and they jump around and knock stuff over, it's cool. Nothing is really breakable, and if it is, it's cheap and it's no big deal. As far as style, my husband's in mine combined is basically like rustic modern. He's like super mid-century with bold patterns. He would have our whole house looking like that if you could. And I'm more like natural and neutral.

neutral. So we have lots of texture. We have lots of straight lines, natural materials, and like cool, neutral tones. Okay. Let's talk briefly about what that all means together for my home to kind of help you see yours. So we have two big dining tables and a couple of coffee tables that we move around to make sure that large groups can sit comfortable. We host our church community group almost once a month and it's like 30 people and so it's it was a priority for us when we were doing our renovation um we did a like an addition when we found out that we were surprised having a third baby um and we kind of had this like room that was sort of a glorified hallway and we thought what are we going to do with this room when we did this edition well at that time we had just had

the one regular like dining table that normally seats six you know just like a standard i don't know eight foot table is that right um so it was a lot of people would come over, it was a little bit tricky. And so we had this table that we had built years ago outside in an unused sunroom that could seat, that puppy can seat like 12 people. And so we had it refinished. It became a priority. It was like, no, we want to have a place that's welcoming that people don't worry where they're going to sit down because we do, we have a big family. Like I said, we host our really large community group about once a month. We have parties a lot. And so it just made total sense for that room's priority, how it served our home,

to have another big table in it. So we have two really large tables. We have like several coffee tables that we can kind of move around to make sure that like large groups can sit and all that stuff. Our couch is huge. It's really worn. We've had it for like years. Like almost 15 years, maybe, something like that. We've had it recovered once the seams are splitting. It's no big deal. But it gets like the seams are splitting. It gives off zero heirs of being pristine, right? We have tons of books and games, like a tiny collection of art supplies. Our kids pretty much just want to draw. We have like paint and all the other things, but they just like to draw. So we kind of stick with that mostly. That way we're able to kind of

stick around home without getting antsy. We're just kind of with those simple things to sort of play with and be entertained. Here's what we don't have. We don't have exercise equipment. We have ridden that ride for a while and they just became laundry hangers. So nope, we don't have exercise equipment. We don't really have tools. Neither of us are very handy. So that doesn't take up space. We don't have camping stuff, sports equipment. Like none of those things are priorities in the service of our personal home. So we don't have those things. They just don't take a space for us because we don't want them to take up space when they don't take priority. Also, we have three kids, two elementary age boys who are crazy and a daughter who's almost

two and she's super and everything. I love things made of glass. Mercury glass, that really pretty copper glass, those giant succulent glass bowls. I live at all. And they are definitely my style, right? They're natural and they're neutral. but they do not fit with how I want my home to currently serve my family and the spirit of indestructibility, right? Because they will 100% break.

They have. If I led with the part of my style that loves glass, like if that came first, right, I'd have a house full of glass stuff because I love glass. And then I would resent my kids for breaking it. Or I would keep them from jumping around and kind of being curious in the house and sort of living. in it because I'm worried. I'm more worried about maintaining my style and my stuff than them. Does that make sense? So start with how your home serves you. Choose maybe three activities you do in your home that make your home feel most like itself. Are you allowing your home to function in a way where those things shine, where they get to work well and succeed without frustration? I recently bought

a couple of pitchers, like, you know, like drink pitchers, because, like I said, we have people over so often. And I usually just set out drinks for people to help themselves, but I never had anything to put the dang drinks in. It was so frustrating. Like, how my friends can't help themselves to tea. Like, I need to have pictures. So I bought pitchers. Now, did I buy those glorious ceramic Joanna Gaines pitchers that I walk by every time I'm getting yogurt at Target and pine over? No, I didn't. Sadly, no. They are so beautiful, but they are also so easily chipped. And I don't want the spirit of my home to be one of fragility, not right now. If the third grader in our community group awkwardly pours herself water from my clear plastic pitcher and bangs it

against the counter, she will not worry the same as if she did that to my beloved Joanna Gaines pitcher, right? Now those pictures are superfluous. my style. Like when I see them, I feel like they were made for me. I adore them with all my heart. But they don't fit with the service and the spirit of my home, at least not right now. That's just another example. Don't lead with style. Okay. So do things in the right order, and it's just going to make all the difference. It really will. Service, spirit, and then style. Okay, over the next couple of weeks, we will talk more about our homes, but specifically about cleaning them? Blurg. It has to happen, y'all. So we might as well be lazy geniuses about it, right?

I will say this. Stuff is the enemy of clean every time. If you have too much of it or it doesn't have a home, you will spend all the time you have to clean taking care of your stuff instead, picking up, tiding up, moving stuff around, all that. I have created a really great lazy genius resource for you. It's called the swap. And it is available today, actually, through the end of So you've got lots of time, but I would encourage you to not wait, especially because you can get a head start on this cleaning conversation by kind of getting your stuff under control and sort of getting a jump start on how you're going to see your stuff before we start talking about cleaning, spring cleaning and tidying and all those different things. So you can check that out at the lazy genius collective.com slash stuff. I'll also put a link to it in the show notes in case you just want to go straight to the show notes. the lazy genius collective.com slash lazy slash home.

And then please join me on Instagram every Thursday, this Thursday especially, but every Thursday at 1215 Eastern. We talk live about that week's podcast episode and anything else you have questions about. My handle is at the lazy genius. And I'll pop that in the show notes for you too so you can just click to get there. Okay. So before we go, let's do a lazy genius tip of the week. I know they're a bit of an investment, but swiffer sheets, y'all, they're so magical.

I have used microfiber cloths and specific dusting rags and then socks. And the socks are my runner-up choice, by the way, for dusting furniture. But those swiffer sheets, they're meant for floors, but y'all, for dusting furniture, they are the mac daddy of quick dusting. I will grab one, and I will just dust until it can't pick anything else up. and most of the time I get through most of my house in less than two minutes. And I don't have like a humongous house, but like just surfaces, man. Wipe them, wipe them, wipe them.

It's done. They are so powerful. They are worth the extra pennies of not having a mediocre rag and having a spray pledge and remembering where the pledge is and all the things. I just love Swiffer Sheets. I just love them. I feel like it's one of those things that is worth paying for the convenience of it. Some things aren't that is to me.

So there's not an ad. I just love them and I find them to be essential. So that's the lazy genius tip of the week, y'all. Dusting is a beast, but not when you have swiffer sheets. Okay, that is it for today. I am so glad you were here with me. Thank you so much for joining me. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

Bye, guys. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that, more dangerous than a B minus or a C. C plus life because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.