Your Apartment Doesn’t Need to Be Finished

There is an expectation that when we move into a new home, we should immediately start working toward finishing it.

The furniture needs to be bought. The walls need art. The shelves need objects. Every empty corner seems to require a purpose.

Until then, we tend to describe our homes as works in progress.

But homes are always works in progress.

They change as we change. We move things around, replace furniture, bring home objects from trips, inherit things from family, find art we love and eventually get rid of things that no longer feel like us.

Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to finish your apartment at all.

We See More Homes Than Ever Before

It’s difficult not to compare your home when you’re constantly seeing other people’s.

Social media gives us access to beautifully designed apartments every day. Apartment tours, renovation videos and carefully photographed interiors have made good design more accessible and given us plenty of inspiration.

They have also changed our expectations.

We’re often seeing a finished image rather than the years it took to create it. We don’t see the months when the wall was empty, the old couch that came before the new one or the years someone spent collecting the objects on their shelves.

When you’re comparing your everyday home to someone else’s finished photograph, yours can start to feel incomplete.

Good Homes Take Time

The most interesting homes often feel collected rather than designed all at once.

There might be a piece of furniture passed down from family, art purchased while traveling, books accumulated over years or something found unexpectedly at an antique store.

Those things are difficult to recreate by buying everything at once.

Leaving some space unfinished gives you time to figure out what you actually like.

An empty wall doesn’t need art simply because it’s empty. You can wait until you find something you genuinely want to look at every day.

The same goes for furniture.

Buying something just to fill a space often means replacing it later. Living with an empty corner for a few months might be better than buying a chair you never really wanted.

Your Home Doesn’t Need to Follow One Aesthetic

There is also a tendency to think everything in a home needs to belong to the same visual style.

Real homes rarely work that way.

Our tastes change. We keep things for sentimental reasons. We move pieces from one room to another. We combine something new with something we’ve owned for ten years.

A home can have different periods of your life represented in the same room.

That doesn’t necessarily make it less cohesive. It makes it personal.

You Can Have People Over Now

One of the unfortunate consequences of wanting our homes to feel finished is that we sometimes postpone actually using them.

We tell ourselves we’ll host dinner once we have a bigger table. We’ll invite people over once we’ve decorated. We’ll have everyone over once the apartment looks the way we imagined it would.

There will probably always be something you want to change.

The people coming to your home aren’t experiencing it as a design project. They’re experiencing the evening they spent there.

They’ll remember the conversation, the music, what you ate and who was there far more than whether there was anything hanging above your couch.

A home doesn’t have to be complete before it can be shared.

Your Taste Is Supposed to Change

The things you like now won’t necessarily be the things you like five years from now.

That’s normal.

As you live somewhere, you learn what actually works for you. Maybe you realize you need more seating and less storage. Maybe you discover you love having color around you after years of buying neutrals. Maybe something you thought was essential turns out not to matter very much.

Your home gets better when it responds to the way you actually live rather than the way you imagined you would live.

That takes time.

There Is No Finished Version

Eventually, you might buy the rug you’ve been looking for or finally hang something on the empty wall.

Then something else will change.

That’s part of having a home.

The goal doesn’t need to be reaching a point where there’s nothing left to add, move or reconsider.

A home is a place you’re actively living in. It can change with your circumstances, your taste, the people in your life and the things you collect along the way.

Your apartment doesn’t need to be finished.

It just needs to feel like yours <3