Household Shuffle

It's Monday! Time for the weekly installment on my Radical Homemaking efforts. Want to learn more about what that means, check out THIS post and THIS post. 


I'm a form and function kind of girl. I don't care for wasted space or money and in my estimation, a home is a living entity in service of the humans that reside there. Through my Radical Homemaking journey, I've been challenged to look at my home in a new way. If it is truly a unit of production and creation, rather than one of consumption and waste, then where are the empty, unused spaces? Where is waste happening?

The main issue that I saw with our home was that the guest room, which remained empty most of the time, was being heated and cooled with expensive forced air. Additionally, my art studio, which I work in all of the time, was being heated and cooled with separate units. I was wasting a valuable resource every day.

So, my latest undertaking here at La Maison Boheme is to completely rearrange my household layout. My goals are to create communal spaces that better serve the needs of my family and to heat and cool only those spaces we're using.

I have already flipped our dinning and living rooms. This provided a cozier seating area with better natural light in the living space and a bigger, more expansive space for the dinning area. (I'll share photos in the following weeks). I have also moved my boys out of their bedroom and into the smaller guest room in order that their bedroom, which is the largest in the house, could become my studio.

Why why WHY would you change your studio?  I can hear you now. Why would I, after all the WORK I put into my current studio, tear it all down and change rooms? Just hear me out. The studio space, while beautiful and functional and working for me, was not working in harmony with the rest of the household. My goal is for everything in the house to work together. Harmony, sustainability, form and function and smart use of resources - these are the stars at which I must now set my compass.

This week, I'm moving into my new art studio. Here are some quick snap shots of the space as it stands right now. Again, once this whole transition is complete, I'll post photos. Until then, wish me luck. It's an enormous undertaking, but one that is well worth the planning and effort.

Read more Radical Homemaking posts HERE.