I don’t always love home management but I love homemaking. I am distinguishing between these two terms because I believe that homemaking is the art of making a house feel like a home whereas home management is all of the tasks that keep a household running, including things like budgeting and meal planning. So homemaking is a part of home management, and for me, the most enjoyable part. Like I’m sure many of you do as well, I tend to romanticize homemaking with images, feelings, and smells of things like thick warm quilts, pies baking in the oven, and apple picking with my husband. So for this section the focus is on JOY! Here are a few things I’ve learned in my journey.

Work with where you are

This one has always been hard for me. I have been dreaming of my own house for years but we have yet to make it a reality. In the past, me and my husband were living in an apartment in a small city. Here we had a couple of bedrooms and bathrooms, as well as our own living room and kitchen. But a couple of years ago, we made the difficult decision to move back into my parent’s home in order to save money to eventually buy our own house. Here “our space” consists of a small bedroom where we have our bed, as well as a bean bag and tv set to function as our “living room”. The kitchen is ultimately my moms, but we can use it as we need. And the bathrooms are all shared. This has pushed me immensely to rethink my ideas around homemaking.

Ultimately homemaking is about making the most of where your are living right now, whatever that looks like. So if all you have to work with is one room, do your best to make it work. In some ways this forces you to focus on the area that would make the most of a difference to you anyways.

Embrace cooking delicious meals

When you are very busy, it can be hard to find time to dedicate to making your house feel like a home. But ultimately people need to eat. And your options are to get premade or takeout food, or cook something at home. The first two may be quicker but if those are your go to all day every day, it will end up costing you a ton and isn’t exactly feasible.

So embrace cooking at home, and try to make the best of it. Even if it is just a few times a week, try and get lost in the romance of cooking a delicious meal. This does not have to mean a difficult or time consuming dinner, just something that tastes great and can give you that sense of accomplishment and fill the house with beautiful smells. You may think you aren’t good enough of a cook. I promise that the path to becoming a great cook is simply one made by practice. Since I have embraced cooking as a hobby, I have turned a chore into something I truly enjoy.

Try out baking

That is if you haven’t already. Baking is one of the easiest ways to make your environment feel like home because the beautiful smells of fresh baked goods and warm comforting taste are truly hard to beat. I would recommend starting with something easy such as chocolate chip oatmeal cookies or a basic white bread. Stay tuned for my recipes on these. Another great thing about bread is that the vast majority of the time it takes to make it is just time spent waiting. It takes maybe ten minutes of engaged work, the rest is all the yeast and the oven. There is also something nice about ditching the consumer culture and making your own bread at home.

Decorate your space

Decorate your space with things that make you happy and remind you of wonderful memories. Be intentional. In our room, we don’t have too many decorations out but the ones that we do, we love. We have a wedding picture, a woodcarving we got on our first vacation together, a blanket from my husband’s grandmother on our bed, and some other things that we love. These small things make it feel not just like a home, but our home.

Do things out of joy, not obligation

Some people love sewing, others don’t. The same goes for gardening. These are two things commonly associated with homemaking. But they aren’t necessary. So especially when you have a limited time to spend on homemaking, don’t waste it on things that won’t actually make you or your family happy. Instead of doing things out of obligation, do the homemaking tasks that genuinely bring you joy, I promise that will be enough.

Check out the other posts in the Home Management for Busy People Series:

I hope you that homemaking brings you the same kind of joy that it has brought me.