pursuits #1: how to make a home from a rented house
A guide to creating a space that loves you back (for free and for cheap)
When was the last time you felt at home?
In your twenties, living in rented spaces, with a revolving door of flatmates, it’s easy to feel displaced. Dis-place: to have your place in the world literally dissipated, negated.
For many of us, these years are presented as the inevitable in-between, a liminal space which we fill with friends or Spareroomers. The unspoken wisdom is: a house is something you live in until someone loves you enough to make a home with you. In the meantime, it’s all just temporary: so you don’t frame your posters, you don’t buy furniture, you don’t paint the walls. Your houseshare is the doomed situationship, the lover you know you won’t end up with, the right-person-wrong-time: why say “I love you,” when you know this isn’t happily-ever-after? Why go in deep with something that isn’t yours forever?
I used to think like this, in absolutes: always, forever, permanence. But over the past four years of living in London, I’ve found the joy of things that don’t last forever. Living with friends, moving houses, goodbye parties, welcome parties — this is could be the greatest love story of my life, of our lives. Why wait for the pleasure of making a house into a home?
I’ve just moved two new flatmates into the house, and we’ve already started crafting a home together: as I write, I can hear them giggling in the kitchen. I spent the last two years building this home with two of my best friends, and now what stands before me, before my new flatmates, is a glowing new opportunity to create another. It’s in the old cliché: make a house a home. It’s an active verb, it’s a process, it’s an intention.
So here’s how we’re making ours.
Cheap and free things that make a difference
Picture frames
Small picture frames will cost you between £1-£3 in a charity shop, larger ones will be anywhere between £5-£20, but even the small A6 ones have made a big difference to my room. I’ve put off framing my pictures for half a decade, as if I didn’t deserve the permanence of having what I like and what I want around me.
I’ve framed all my old posters, plus the postcards (£1) I always buy in museum gift-shops. I’m also waiting on a FreePrints order — you just pay shipping (£2.99) and they’ll print out any photos you want.
Giving away the things you don’t like
It’s weirdly so easy to hold onto things you know you don’t want. Host a clothes swap, take the books you didn’t like to a charity shop, recycle the bedding you never use. Getting rid of clutter has made me feel like my space really belongs to me, not to my past. Life is not about endless accumulation, and I think curation makes you feel more in control of your present.
Repurposing (and serendipity)
Things are just things until you imbue them with your own personal meaning. My flatmate Mandy keeps finding decor for her bedroom outside other people’s houses (and has written about it very beautifully here!). I’ve been terrorising the charity shops of North London looking for the remnants and cast-offs of other people’s lives which I can make my own. See also: saving natty wine bottles and Perello olive tins to stick slightly carcinogenic candles in.
Let go of your Pinterest board
In an ideal world, I would buy the red gingham Piglet in Bed linens, an antique baroque golden-framed mirror, a print of Eve Babitz playing chess naked with Marcel Duchamp, and the Studio 65 Marilyn couch. Instead, like most of us, I have all the furniture my landlord doesn’t want and unlimited access to Facebook Marketplace.
I won’t say I don’t love buying stuff, because I do, but there’s something so much more satisfying about working with what you have. This is where you develop your sense of style and taste, not by buying whatever the algorithm slides your way. You actually, genuinely, cannot buy taste: I am always so much more impressed by people’s spaces when they’ve curated a vibe, rather than paid for one.
Making plans and making things happen
I don’t know if there’s ever been a generation more in-need of housewarming parties: exorcising the ghosts of renters-past with laughter and bodies and music and smoke. We’re hosting a Hallowe(lcome)en party at the end of the month, but even before that, we’ve been filling our space with dinner parties, movie nights, and spontaneous gossip over tea in the kitchen.
This is what you’ll remember in 10 years — not the expensive coffee-maker, not the mouth-blown glassware, not the mouse that lives under the fridge, not how much you spent or how many things went wrong. I’ve already lived in this house for two years, and the memories we created here will stay with me much longer than the lease.
As I blue-tack the photos which chronicle my twenties so far, it doesn’t matter that one day I’ll have to take them down.
Impermanence shouldn’t hold you back: it should crystallise what you have, make you realise how special and good and magic it is to be right here, right now. Because some things are stronger than bricks and walls and frames and leases.
Cuteeee