Apartment Therapy The Eight Step Home Cure

Chapter One Is Your Home Healthy? In the first few years that I took on clients, I was surprised by the number of people who were miserable in their homes. I wondered what was going on to cause so much distress. As I visited more houses and apartments, and began to read books on shelter style and home improvement, I soon realized that most American home dwellers tuning in to home improvement are not simply lacking in style or needing to declutter; they are dealing with sick homes. Despite good intentions, Americans have not only lost touch with how to create and maintain a healthy home, they have created new diseases such as clutter, disposophobia (the fear of letting go of things), and what I call movie theater syndrome and bowling alley syndrome. Like another national health issue, obesity, most of our household issues stem from the fact that we consume too much and work off too little. As you read this book, I want you to broaden the concept of home and apply to it the same principles we apply to our own bodies. Like the body, the home should be thought of as a living organism. For starters, healthy homes are homes that consume carefully and get regular exercise. After health is established, style and decora- tion come much more easily and can be seen as natural finishing touches. In fact, style and decoration are extensions of a healthy home. You can't have one without the other. Hypernesting Today, Americans spend more money on home improvement than ever before. A whopping twenty-five million Americans took on a home improvement project in 2005, spending $150 billion (2 percent of our GNP). Judging from television shows such as Trading Spaces, Design on a Dime, and This Old House, Americans can't seem to get enough. And the demand crosses gender lines: shows such as the tremendously popular Queer Eye for the Straight Guy attract male and female viewers alike, while Debbie Travis's Facelift on both Oxygen and HGTV attracts a growing number of female homeowners wanting to DIY (do it yourself). Each year brings new magazines as well. The old-school Architectural Digest has been pushed aside by flashier offerings such as Metropolitan Home and Elle Decor, and they are now being challenged by newcomers with a focus on shopping and affordability, such as Domino, Budget Living, and Bargain Style. All in all, more Americans than ever are fixing up their homesand doing the work themselves. In all of this they are trying to retrieve the feeling of home they have lost. But despite the amount of activity and money spent, most of these efforts end in dissatisfaction, because they only treat the symptomsthey don't provide a cure. In place of creating a healthy home, we are trying to buy solutions and cram too much into our homes. What was modestly termed "cocooning" in the 1970s by trend-spotters who saw us spending more recreational time at home has become Hypernesting. Instead of asking ourselves what would really make our home work better, we usually jump to the conclusion that there must be something we can buy to solve our home's challengesa flatter television screen, a closet organizing system, or color-coded photo albums. But when we take something new into our home, we rarely let go of something else. This is how our home gains weight, grows unhealthy, and begins to nag at us. Not only have we created some new diseases, we've even created new doctors to treat our problem. Professional organizers and home disaster specialists have sprung up only recently, and their job is to help us sort and manage our extra weight. Most of us aren't in need of more organizing; we need to manage our consumption, let go of our stuff, and learn how to restore life to our homGillingham-Ryan, Maxwell is the author of 'Apartment Therapy The Eight Step Home Cure', published 2006 under ISBN 9780553383126 and ISBN 0553383124.