What your house wants from you this year.

New year’s resolutions are a bit of an enigma. We hate them, but make them anyway because it’s hard to resist a fresh start, a clean slate, the opportunity to be a better version of ourselves. Unless you don’t, you know, do any of the things because the thing about resolutions is that under the bells, whistles, and bubbles, the year end ritual, the conversation piece at yet another awkward party, it’s just a blurry picture of our ambitions, a plastic version of a rewritten narrative. We know this though, our unused gym memberships and dusty juicers are physical proof of the concept.

And yet, we make them. Because we masochistically agree to let ourselves down annually? As a deadline to activate change? But whats the point if we keep putting it off…the diet always starts Monday, after all. Self growth is very rarely linear, so why would expect something as linear as resolutions tend to be to succeed? Rather than some grand, life altering changes that likely won’t make it past the month, lets focus on small, achievable gains that will eventually become habit and add up to a better you. Forget resolutions on focus on your dreams and the small steps it takes to achieve them. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are you.

Now let’s raise a toast to welcome 2017, which promises to be so much better. Well, it could be, anyway. We hope so, at least. What we’re saying is: hold on. To that end, we put together a list of simple resolutions to help make the next 12 months just a tad brighter than the ones before. Tiny ways to care for your home and as a result your family.

1. Lets get healthier. This doesn’t mean some grand plans to redo the kitchen, because lets be honest between your indecisiveness and shoe addiction that probably won’t happen. How about just changing the air filter every month or two? The current one is about two months past it’s expiration and it’s getting hard to breathe in here. On that note…
2. Remember last year, when you vowed to be “greener”? Well, you typed solar panels into Google, got distracted by an “amazing diet pill” pop up ad, and decided that was a better investment (eye roll). How about this year we focus on turning off lights? And I like being warm as much as the next person, but did I really need to be set at 75 degrees in January when you visited your parents in Florida for two weeks? It’s the little things that add up, not deciding you are going to compost then quitting about 2 hours in when you realize you actually think it’s gross.
3. Shake off the excess. It took me moving across the country to finally do this, and it is amazing how much lighter my life feels. Even if it just means cleaning out the junk drawer that has been festering in your kitchen since you moved in, I promise you will feel better. If it doesn’t have a purpose, toss it. That shirt that you don’t like but reminds you of your trip to cancun? Donated. You don’t need a physical reminder of that trip to keep it in your brain. Thats what the internet is for.