Remaster Your Home: How to Create a Functional Home You Can Love

Create a functional home by remastering it. — A dining room doesn’t always have to function as a dining room. It’s important to optimize your home to meet your current needs, not your needs from 10 years ago, and not the needs you wish you had.

Just because your home doesn’t work for you right now, doesn’t mean it can’t! It’s time to remaster it. Evaluate your entire house at once. Figure out what’s working and what’s not. Then come up with a game plan to optimize and create a functional home. You CAN love your home again!

Ten years ago, my house was perfect for my family. It was on the small side, but at the ages of 5, 4 and 1, so were my kids. We spent a lot of time together as a family, and the boys were (for the most part) good at sharing their toys.

Fast forward 10 years and my boys are 15, 14 and 11. To say that we use our home a little differently now would be an understatement. While we still spend a lot of time together, everyone (including me) wants a little more personal space. The older boys definitely don’t want to share a bedroom anymore. Legos and train tracks have long been cleared out to make way for drum sets and floor hockey. There are instruments and sports equipment EVERYWHERE!

The demands we make on our house have changed completely but, until recently, the house hadn’t changed at all. It simply didn’t work for us anymore. Then we started the process of remastering it.

Remaster to Create a Functional Home

What does it mean to remaster a home?

As your life evolves, so should your home. Remastering is the process of making a new and improved master from an old one. Usually it refers to images, movies or audio files, but in this case it refers to your home. When you remaster a home you figure out what’s working and what’s not. Then you optimize the house to meet your current needs, instead of your needs from 10 years ago.

Evaluate the entire house at once.

When a room turns into a disaster area, it’s usually because you’re not using it correctly. Simply cleaning or organizing may be a quick fix, but you won’t solve the long term problem unless you change the way you use the room. Sometimes to change the function of one room, you have to use another room differently as well. Evaluating the entire house at once lets you see how everything works together. It’s very likely that you will discover the solution for one room is hiding in another.

FOR EXAMPLE:

If your kitchen counter looks like a crash scene between a mail truck and a food truck and you have to move mountains of paperwork in order to cook, you’re probably not using your kitchen correctly. Maybe the mail, homework, flyers, etc don’t belong in the kitchen at all. If you could completely remove them from the equation, it might be a lot easier to keep your kitchen clean. It would certainly be a lot easier to cook!

Cue the buts!

But… there’s nowhere else for the mail to go!

But… out of sight, out of mind! If I hide the mail somewhere, I might forget to pay a bill.

But... the kitchen is where we all hang out, so this is where we put everything!

But… it’s just easier to leave it here. I’ll be better at keeping it organized, I promise!

How many times have you made that promise? Evaluate your entire house. Maybe there’s a way to keep the mail somewhere else without turning that into a disaster area too. Could you create an attractive mail center in your foyer, mudroom or hallway?

Moving a function to another room is also an opportunity to change your family’s habits. When you find a new spot for mail and paperwork, give your family a challenge: if no piece of paper hits the kitchen counter AND your new mail center stays organized for a week, take everyone out for ice cream. If you can make it a whole month, go to a movie or your favorite restaurant. Pretty soon, the mail problem will become a distant memory. Everyone will have a new routine and the pile of paperwork in your kitchen will no longer be a source of stress and embarrassment.

Need some inspiration? Meet Virtual Kate.

Kate has a lot of problems with her house, but her dining room causes her the most stress because it’s the first room people see when they come into her house and it’s a complete mess. Every time she cleans it up, it looks good for about 3 days before falling back into chaos. This time, instead of going for the quick fix and simply cleaning her dining room, we are going to change the way she uses it completely. We’ll look at her entire house and evaluate all of her needs at once. Watch as we remaster her dining room and fix another HUGE problem at the same time. Now imagine if she could do this to the whole house!

You can do this!

You can create a functional home with a little bit of work. But you have to be willing to make real changes in order to see and feel real changes. It’s time to break the cycle of overwhelm, frantic cleaning, and a quick return to overwhelm by remastering and optimizing your home. Save the best, fix the rest, and learn to love your home again.

All you need to start is a plan. Pretty soon, I will have a whole tool kit ready for you that will take you through the planning process from start to finish. Until then, check out my articles on Reinventing Your Home With a Master Plan, and Master Planning 101.