In 2013 my family and I packed up all of our belongings and moved from California to Wisconsin. We moved into a rental home because we weren’t sure where we should buy a home. We ended up living in that rental home for two years. The rental home had several clogged pipes and mysterious smells. The floor creaked as you walked around and the upstairs bedroom was insufferably hot in the summer and chillingly cold in the winter.Living in the rental home was a time of great upheaval for our family. I remember my daughters trying to get comfortable in different areas of the house. First, they tried living in the upstairs bedroom of the house, only to find that they couldn’t stay warm enough to sleep in the winter. They moved to the room next to the master bedroom. We found that if we stayed up late to watch television, they couldn’t sleep and so we moved them to the basement.

Needless to say, once we moved into our home, the girls were looking forward to having their own room and we promised them that we would pick out new dressers for them since their stuff had been stored in random boxes in the closets and in various bins in their rooms. We brought the girls to the home improvement store and let them pick out paint colors for their new rooms. Next, we put them to work painting their rooms. Finally, they picked out curtains and framed art with inspirational sayings. The whole process of decorating the bedrooms and common living spaces in our new home was so therapeutic for our family. We were finally “home” in Wisconsin. Our daughters had claimed their space and made it their own. Décor definitely mattered in my life when I tried to make a home for my family.