How to befriend a house - #179
Tending to the relationship you might have forgotten you were in.
Every time you walk through a door, you cross into a new version of yourself. One at rest, one at work, one at the party, one somewhere else with something else in mind. We rarely think of our homes this way—as threshold after threshold, each one a portal. But if you pay attention, you might notice how the edge of the bathtub becomes a place where you ask your body to let go. Or how the mouth of the fridge is where you hover, asking for nourishment, for relief, for distraction. The front door is both a shield and a welcome. The bedroom doorway is a line between alertness and surrender. A home, in this way, isn’t just where life happens. It shapes life as it happens.
We often describe houses or apartments as having “character.” What we usually mean is aesthetics: charming wood trim, original doorknobs, mismatched floorboards. Having character is one thing; becoming a character is another. When a home becomes a character in your life—something active, responsive—a being that influences your moods and rituals, groaning in a storm and letting in that good light, your life shifts from monologue to dialogue.
To say a house has character is easy. To treat it as a character (flawed, aging, maybe a little demanding) asks you to stay in the relationship.
And relationships remember.
Your home remembers where you always pause to take off your shoes—the finish worn off the floor in a spotlight. It remembers the drawer you kick open when your hands are full—its corner softened, almost polished from all those nudges. It remembers where someone used to rest their head against the same spot on the doorframe while on the phone, a faint smudge marking years of tethered listening. The left side of the couch where your body always lands has sagged just a little deeper. The stack of to-be-read, sun-bleached books, covers unchanged, spines barely legible. The back door still bears a fan of scratches from a dog who couldn’t wait to come back in. Even the front doorframe catches slightly from the day it was flung open too hard.
These aren’t just signs of wear. They’re signs of living. Proof that you and your home and everyone who’s been in it have been in it together—even when our attention was elsewhere.
I write often about the porous nature of my house, anthropomorphizing left, right, and center. But it’s never felt as alive as it does with a child in it. We talk to W3 about cleaning not as a chore or a way to erase mess, but as helping the house “feel its best.” We have moved well past “Goodnight room” to say goodnight roof, goodnight stairs, goodnight logs. He knows the fridge hum as breathing. The floorboards as moods. It’s a kind of intimacy I thought somewhat secret to myself until I witnessed it through him.
There’s a word for this—kithship—an old English term that originally meant familiarity not just with people, but with place. In Rooted, Lyanda Lynn Haupt writes about how kithship honors not only connection to the natural world, but also how that world knows us back. What happens when we extend that same mutuality to the built world? A house becomes more than a backdrop. It becomes kin.
This is easier, I think, when the materials in your home still carry some memory of their original form. Wood helps with that. Wood is porous. It shows the scars of living and softening with age. It creaks when the temperature drops, it warps with time. You can still imagine it growing toward the sun. And then of course there’s all the wood stacked inside the logs to keep us warm. A woodstove doesn’t just heat a house—it demands our presence. Chop. Stack. Tend. Repeat.
You can’t ghost a house that runs on firewood.
But you don’t need logs or a mountain cabin to be in relationship with where you live. Any home, anywhere, can be a friend if you treat it like one. And like any friendship, what you give to it often determines what you get back.
When you befriend your home, it becomes a quiet companion in moments of loneliness or transition. It mirrors your state of being—scattered when you’re frantic, glowing when you’re grounded. It becomes a collaborator in your rituals. It forgives you on the days you forget yourself. Most of all, it offers a space where you don’t have to perform. There are parts of every home that are staged—set up to impress, to hide, to suggest something aspirational. But there are also parts that are real.
We tend to be ashamed of those parts, both in our homes and in ourselves. The junk drawer that won’t close. The closet you keep meaning to clean. These are the places we shut behind doors, apologize for, or try to edit out of the frame. But if there are places in our homes that don’t judge us, it’s probably the ones we judge the most.
In ourselves, it’s not so different. We curate what others see, tucking away the messier chapters of who we are. But like the scuffed corners and sagging cushions, these are signs of a life in motion, not a life gone wrong. To befriend your home is to stop apologizing for what’s real. To believe that signs of use are not evidence of failure, but proof of presence. You’ve been here. You’re still here. And that’s something worth honoring.
So how do you actually begin to treat your home like a friend, not just a structure or a coworker in the business of being a person?
Well, like most things, you start small, and you start softly.
Say hello
Greet your house when you walk in. It doesn’t need to be ceremonial. Just a quiet hello, like you would offer a friend who’s been waiting in the kitchen. I say hi to these logs as I’m walking up the hill or driving home in the snow. Just a little wave. Hi, home.
Track the light
Notice where the light lands throughout the day, throughout the seasons. This is a very easy entry into the practice of phenology: the study of the timing of recurring biological events in nature. Let the shifting shadows and golden hour streaks show you how the seasons are moving through the walls. Even consider rearranging based on them.
Clean something you usually don’t
Not as a punishment or a chore, but as an act of shared care. You're helping your home feel its best. Wipe down the light switches. Dust the baseboard. Dust off the lights! Clean the door knob. I’m not saying give your place an “everything shower”, but just pay that one small bit of extra attention.
Name something
Give something a name. The tree outside your window. The cranky window latch. The weird corner where dust collects. Names create intimacy. I obviously named this place Shangrilogs, but I just call it Logs for short. If my pets can have 47 different names I call them, so can my home.
Try a repair or update
Fix something, even if it takes several weeks of YouTube videos. Not everything needs outsourcing, some things just need noticing. Put out a vase with some fall branches. Buy some cute hooks from thrift or salvage and add them to the back of a door or your entryway. Treat it not like a gift to yourself, but a gift to place. “Here, now I’ll stop leaving my coats all over your floor.”
Follow the creatures
Let a child or pet guide you. Watch how they move through the space. Crawl where they crawl. Sit where they sit. They'll show you the forgotten places where hair ties and milk caps live.
Add an altar of oddities
Maybe the space feels drab, and there’s not a mysterious benefactor funding your thrifting dreams. You can still make an altar in your home that makes it feel like a place to come home to. I love making little altars all over my house because they symbolize bits of myself I like to nurture. Try it!
Make a ritual with the space
Choose one small gesture that includes your house. Morning coffee on the cold tile. Tapping the doorframe before you leave. A mantra as you close the shades. These are not habits. They’re acts of relationship.
Over time, these moments layer. They build toward something: reverence, kinship, steadiness.
Your house might not speak, but it’s listening. And if you let it, it will hold the version of you that walks through each door—again and again—with a little more care.
As I sit with my coffee in my favorite spot watching my bird feeder through the open door this offering was a lovely reminder of how lucky I am. Since my retirement a few years ago and a relocation after a relationship adjustment I have time and emotional space to become truly present in my home. Your writing often seems to arrive at just the place I need to articulate. Thank you.
This is the most beautiful article .Now I have to reach out to my friend in Chile for her to send me the 3 legged pig 😊. I absolutely loved this article . Thank you