The Edit

Sometimes we build rooms around decisions long after we’ve stopped choosing them. What if you designed for where you’re going instead?

My sister moves rooms seasonally, sometimes even more often. The dining room becomes the living room, the bedroom becomes the game room, the office gets plumbed and repurposed as the laundry room, a bed-sized closet becomes a bedroom. Then back again. Each time she needs a different sort of support from her home it’s musical chairs….and rooms. 

Not necessarily for everyone, but a good reminder that your home doesn't care what the architect called the room. We do. If you need an art studio more than you need a dining room, congratulations. You have an art studio.

Ask what you need and find how your home can support it. Then move rooms, move chairs, hell, move plumbing if that’s what you need to do.

Keep a close eye on what you’re moving. Are you choosing it because you own it, or are you choosing it because it supports the way you live? We don’t have to keep choosing what doesn’t support us. 

Maybe it was a gift, maybe it was an expensive mistake, maybe you loved it at one time, but its time has passed. Let it go with love. No landfills please.

Find someone who will love it in its next life. Goodwill, Facebook Marketplace, Habitat for Humanity, your niece who is just starting to build a nest of her own. Let it go with gratitude and move toward what will support you in your next season.

While perhaps the most fun part of reimagining your space is the beginning, all possibility and color and fabric and material and the impossibly perfect piece you’ve stumbled on, my Mom would tell you (and remind me) that the most important part of the whole process is the edit, at every stage. 

A discerning eye will inform you that the 7th color is one too many (though, that’s not a rule - in another journal, I’ll probably tell you why 7 colors work beautifully, but the room didn’t find its voice until colors 8 and 9). That perhaps what the room really needs is a breath, known in design as negative space (the space left intentionally clear).

But editing isn't always the same as subtracting. Sometimes the edit is the thing you add. The larger lamp that finally gives the room the scale it needed. The loud floral chair that makes all the safer choices around it make sense. The art moved six inches lower. The next pattern you were afraid would be too much.

The point isn't less. The point is clearer. And always, more supportive of your average Tuesday.

A good edit asks the same question over and over: What are we trying to do here? 

• Not: What is this room supposed to be?

• Not: What do I already own?

• Not: What will people think is appropriate?

  
  

What does this room need to do for the people who live here now?

Formal living room and guest room are never used? What might they become? The sectional made sense at one time, but now you stumble over its mass while you’re developing a new yoga practice? The dining room is only for Thanksgiving on the off-year you’re not with the in-laws?

Please edit like you’re writing a hero’s journey, because essentially, you are. The room isn't the story. You are. Your home should help you become whoever comes next. 

You can’t partner with your home when it’s full of your old life. Children grow up. People start working from home. Hobbies appear. Bodies change. Families grow and shrink. We entertain differently. We inherit things. We get rid of things. Sometimes we simply discover that the person who chose the gray sofa eight years ago would very much like a chartreuse one now. 

A home that's doing its job gets to change too. 

Maybe the best rooms aren't finished. Maybe they're simply right for this season, not by throwing away everything from where you've been.

By choosing deliberately what gets to come with you.

Mom taught me that the most important part of design was the edit. Perhaps the edit isn't how we finish a room at all, but how we allow it to keep becoming ours.