Myquillyn Smith once lived in a house for six months before she hung her pictures.
Six months after that, she moved out.
It struck her that half the time she spent in that house, it wasn’t beautiful. And that was all because she was afraid to make a mistake.
That experience helped Smith let go of her fear and embrace a home’s imperfections. It’s the central theme of her blog, Nesting Place (www.thenester.com), as well as her new book, The Nesting Place: It Doesn’t Have to be Perfect to be Beautiful.
Make no mistake; Myquillyn Smith — her name, as she explains it, is pronounced like Jacqueline but with a Mike — works hard at making her home look great. You don’t get your house featured in magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Better Homes and Gardens Do It Yourself if it’s frumpy or filthy.
It’s just that she doesn’t fret about the broken leg on the $12 wingback chair she slipcovered or worry about having to patch nail holes in the walls. She thinks it’s more important to live in a house than just look at it.
“The point of my house isn’t to be this perfect showcase,” she said by phone from her home near Charlotte, N.C. A house should be a place to rest and connect with family and friends, she said. It can be beautiful without being perfect.
In fact, Smith thinks a little imperfection makes a house more welcoming, because it puts people at ease. “I’m not comfortable in a house that seems perfect,” she said.
What’s more, she doesn’t think you have to live in your dream home in order to love it. That’s another lesson she’s learned from experience: She and her husband have lived in 14 homes in their 19-year marriage, including an apartment she had no money to decorate, a 250-square-foot rental she describes as a glorified garage and a charming 1910 bungalow with five fireplaces and neighbors with bars on their windows. She could either dwell on the shortcomings of those homes, she realized, or she could embrace the positives and make those homes the best they could be. (Or, in the case of the house in the crime-ridden neighborhood, she could move on.)
She thinks the idea of an idyllic dream home is a lie, “but I also think every house has the potential to be a dream house,” Smith said. It’s all about learning to stop fantasizing about the next house and start focusing on the current one, she said. And it’s about taking action now instead of waiting for the time — and the house — to be right.
Smith has come to realize her dream home is wherever her family is. Besides, she’s learned there’s a lot of satisfaction to be found in figuring out cheap, creative solutions to a home’s limitations. She once covered an ugly fireplace surround with stick-on chalkboard paper and drew chalk lines on it to look like the mortar between bricks, and she jazzed up the plain wall behind her bed by taping it with white duct tape in a diamond pattern.
Smith embraces the creative challenge of making something out of almost nothing. She wouldn’t get the same contentment out of maxing out her credit cards to fill her house with new furniture, she said. Nor would she have the money to do the things she thinks are really important, such as sponsoring three children through the Christian organization Compassion International.
Taking those kinds of decorating chances can be scary, she conceded, but what’s the worst that could happen? If those projects hadn’t turned out, she could have just peeled off the chalkboard paper and sanded and repainted the wall. After all, “you can’t ruin something if you already hate it,” she said.
And if it’s not perfect, that just makes your house — and you — more approachable, Smith believes.
She’s discovered that whenever she reveals her imperfections to others, whether it’s a rip in her sofa or the fact that her husband once lost his business, “it’s only resulted in good things,” she said. “It’s only resulted in stronger relationships.”
To her, that’s beautiful.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/mbbreck, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.