How Did You Make Your Home More Livable During the Pandemic?
At the beginning of the pandemic, we were all in blissful denial of the permanence with which we would be stuck at home. Schools, offices and other businesses closed, but only for a couple of weeks. We thought that in the worst case, the children would be at home until the end of the school year, things would calm down, and we might have to worry about the virus re-emerging in the fall.
Comprehension has been slow – and it may still be, as school districts struggle with how (and whether to) open their doors in the coming weeks. The virus will not disappear in the summer. Low numbers in your area would not mean they will stay low in your area. Being in a room with other people gradually turned from a feeling of risk to downright dangerous.
And all this time you rushed around the house or apartment, tirelessly living, working and raising children in a space in which you could not even imagine that you would spend so much time. The open concept that was great for entertainment has now turned into a concentration nightmare, and the guest bedroom has an inch of dust. Most of us have had to do something with our homes to make them more livable and workable. This is the topic discussed in this post from Toddles on Ask MetaFilter :
I have finally come to terms with the fact that we (where I live) have been in SIP for a long time. I’ve already gone through the house cleaning phase and made a huge craving by gifting a lot of things to my neighbors. I am now moving into the “home remodeling” phase, where I start moving furniture and reconfiguring rooms for the future in which we will live most of our life at home. For example, our living room is no longer a living room, it is an indoor games room with a play structure and other amenities.
I’ve worked from home for many years, so I’m lucky to have a home office in a spare bedroom upstairs. On the other hand, my husband had never worked from home until this year and we struggled to find a good job for him. We cannot share an office because I need a quiet place to write all day and he is constantly on the phone. He tried to set up a card table to work on our closed sun deck, but the noise from the surroundings and the unregulated temperature made him return to the kitchen table within a couple of weeks.
However, we made our backyard a more usable space. It is quite small, and we did not use it as often as our son got older, that is, until we had to leave the house and we could not go anywhere. We bought a couple of new garden chairs, hung some lanterns around the fence, and he made it his mission to make our grass better than ever. Now we are there with drinks at least a couple of times a week.
With many months ahead of us, I’m curious what others have done to make your homes more livable and livable right now. Have you rearranged furniture? Have you bought small desks so that your children have a place for virtual classes? Transformed your guest bedroom into a home gym?
Tell us: how did you rearrange furniture or reconfigure your home to survive this pandemic?