The hardest thing about change is changing.


The hardest thing about moving forward into your future is letting go of the past.


The past does not exist for you to live in it from the present. Those moments, like this one, were something we were just passing through. We’re always just passing through. Which is why I don’t like to think of a house as a castle or a monument or a museum. A house is not an end in and of itself. It’s a base of operations. A vehicle for growing relationships. A factory for making moments and memories. A vessel, a ship, constantly adapting itself to life’s next adventure.


We shouldn’t confuse houses and homes. But we do. Just like you are so much more than your body, but you do live in it, and it does effect the way you live. So my real home is not my house or the stuff inside it. My house is not my story, but it helps me tell my story.


John Ruskin put it this way, “We seek two things from our buildings. We want them to shelter us and we want them to speak to us. Speak to us of the things we find most important and need to be reminded of.”


So you see, at the end of the day, the house is not the project. You are the project. It is not the remodel. You are the remodel. When we’re doing this right we’re not designing our houses, we’re designing our lives. We don’t purge and declutter houses. We purge and declutter and organize our own hearts and minds and priorities. That’s why it’s so tough sometimes. Because we don’t know ourselves as well as we should, and we don’t like to change, and we don’t like to let go. But that’s exactly why it’s so important.


Home is where your heart is. Like the song says, “home is whenever I’m with you.” Home is family and friends, and it simply doesn’t take much “stuff” to satisfy your friends. If it does, you have the wrong friends. And if you don’t feel like you have enough stuff, well, maybe you haven’t invested in enough friends. Maybe there’s a hole in your boat where the meaning keeps leaking out.


I want you to live in a beautiful house that tells your beautiful story. So I want you to declutter it, purge it, organize it, redesign it and refine it. Not because your house needs more stuff but because it needs more you.



I’ve built a lot of houses and I’ll tell you this, houses only truly start to look like homes when the people inside them decide, not to build themselves a beautiful house, but to build themselves a beautiful life.