Home is where the _____ is.
I’m in the process of moving house. We’ve been visiting the new house over the weekend, but we haven’t moved any furniture in yet.
During our errands, my housemate said “let’s go home”, and it took me a moment to realise that he was referring to the new house. He was being slightly facetious, but it made me think. That new house obviously isn’t “home” yet, but when will it be “home”?
I realised there are two answers for me: a functional one and a psychological one.
The functional answer for me is “home is where the bed is”. The day after I’ve moved my bed into the new house and have slept there overnight is the day I’ll refer to it as my home (as in “let’s go home”).
The psychological answer is that it will feel like my home when I’m comfortable walking through the house in the middle of the night in bare feet – when I know the place well enough to walk around in the dark without anything to protect me from danger. I have to have lived in a place for a while for it to feel like home.
So… what makes a place “home” for you? When you move into a new house or apartment or condo or tent or treehouse, what makes it feel like “home”? What’s that moment when you know that this house is now a home?
Home is somewhere I walk in the door, autopilot turns on, and self-consciousness turns off.
So for me it's a combination of memory and privacy. There's a sense of 'close but not quite' when I'm at my parents' house, because it has the memory and the autopilot, but the mask is still on. Same with the office, really.
The trust.
I've never felt comfortable in my parents' apartment 'cause there was no sense of privacy and personal space there, apart from the bathroom time. The wall were thin, and the people were nosey.
When I went to the first uni, I met a girl. She rented an apartment not far from the uni. We grew close, and I'd spent a lot of time at her place for a year and a half. Her place wasn't pretty, or big, or modern – it even only had one interior door – but it was where I could be myself and still be appreciated. The food she made me wasn't fancy, but it felt good 'cause it was made with love. No fast food felt as good as a bowl of buckwheat with sour cream there.
I now live alone, at my own studio apartment. Beyond the wall adjacent to my bed is the neighbor's toilet, and I can hear him pee rather clearly, especially in the evening. Above me is a couple with a little girl who gets yelled at by the mother and who sounds like the grandma and cries out of sheer terror after that every week or so. Somewhere else is a couple – maybe even the same one – who have very short sex, with the woman moaning unmistakably for up to five minutes and then going quiet, like nothing happened. I can hear the microwave ovens going off (PING!) and people visiting the toilet at up to two stories far in either direction.
I take care of this place, I sleep here, I eat here, and I work here – but it doesn't feel like home.
I hadn't thought about it, but my apartment building must have sound dampening walls or something, because I almost never notice any noise from adjacent units. I won't take it for granted now.
The thicker the walls, the less you hear about the life of your neighbors.
It could also be because they're generally quiet folks, and you're lucky.
What’s this about buckwheat and sour cream? That sounds tasty
On the other aspects, I agree that noise is a big factor in being to feel at home somewhere. There are substitutes, like if there’s a sufficient “home feeling” being given by other factors like someone else living there though.
Buckwheat kasha is one of the staple dishes around here. It's cheap, easy to make, and can be made better with a number of the equally-cheap additives. Sour cream, butter, and ketchup are but a few common. Sour cream, in particular, had the special quality of being associated with the image of a cat I was associated with for the girl: I had a mustache (so, like whiskers), was fairly independent, and liked sour cream like them cats do.
The girl's apartment was on the top floor of the building, and the roof space was often occupied by pigeons. At night, they could get noisey.
The family next door also had a baby who'd cry from time to time. I'd never heard anyone else but the baby from that apartment, so I'm guessing it was because of the high pitch of a baby's cry. It would break the heat of the moment when we were having sex – I can't just ignore a baby crying, even if it isn't mine – but we'd get on with it soon after.
So – yeah, there can be trade-offs, and noise alone isn't the issue.
That said, my neighbors next door are listening to music and talking really loudly, and I can hear 'em well enough. Those aren't philosophical debates they're having. I'd rather not hear 'em at all. The funny part? I hear them worse now than I hear the kid above and her mother.
That sounds tasty, I'll try and make that soon. It sounds kinda like something I've made/eaten before but made with rice .
There's a neighbor above who's taken to occasionally having a bunch of tiny dogs and locking them in the apartment while being gone for hours at a time..
I've been lucky. All the flats/apartments I've ever lived in have been solid concrete construction - including the internal walls. It makes them bloody cold in winter and too hot in summer, because those concrete walls take forever to heat up and then forever to cool down, but... it means there's absolutely no noise from the neighbours.
Don't forget the wifi...concrete buildings and wifi. Why is so hard to think this in nowadays? In our new apartment build in fucking 2018/19 they actually nailed the router to a wooden board behind a door in a hole in the wall. The signal is horrific and I can't get the my newly acquired booster to work :(
I've never really had a problem with wi-fi. Then again, my device is usually only one or zero walls away from my router.
When a friend of mine at a LAN party announced they were going home another responded with "home is where your computer is" in an attempt to get them to stay a little longer. It might be fairly accurate given how much of my leisure time is spent at a computer.
All throughout my 20s, whenever I moved it never felt like home until I got my desktop setup. As soon as that was setup, I could immediately jump into some sense of familiarity. Since then I've switched to laptops, so that doesn't work anymore :) I've also gotten some new priorities in life, so I guess now it'd be home is where I can walk around the house in my underpants without judgement.
Haha, that's always my first priority too. I've literally had my computer with internet set up on unopened moving boxes, and slept in my jeans on the floor because I haven't set up my bed yet.
I'm too lazy to find it but there is an xkcd about that
I believe you're thinking of Moving
I flew across the country to start my job with only one checked bag containing 5 sets of clothes, a desktop computer and one monitor.
Just the clothes. It was very snug in there, but I definitely got lucky.
Have you ever sat with a laptop at a coffee shop or similar? If you did, how did that feel?
I've never owned a laptop. But to take your question less literally I use my pc at home differently than my phone at a cafe. I don't feel as comfortable reading long articles on my phone as a pc, rarely watch videos and then only short ones, I don't play phone games and I save non urgent computing tasks for when I get home.
My question was more about how people often go to coffee shops etc. to work. I was wondering if those who do it have any sort of familiarity or comfort around such public places. You don't, clearly, and neither do I. And because I don't, I was looking to find out more about this.
Seeing as I was about to say this exact thing, I think I'd agree. Always in front of a computer, computer for leisure, computer for work, computer for school etc
It's funny, for me home is an origin (as in coordinates origin). For example, if I'm on vacation, I'll refer to my hotel as home. Might be because I grew up only sleeping in my own bed/room half the time.
Did you travel a lot?
Not really. My elementary/junior high was pretty far from where I lived, but very close to my grandparents. Couple that with my mom working pretty late, we really only went home on weekends (and sometimes not even if we had a special family event or something). And then mix that with visiting my maternal grandparents across the country during the summers, and week-long sleepovers with friends here and there, I spend a lot of my childhood in sleeping bags on floors, on couchs, and such.
And then university came around and I rented a different room pretty much every 8 months.
When I think about where I'm most comfortable, for the longest time it was just being alone in my car (can you tell I'm an introvert).
I'm not familiar with the situation: you rent rooms in the university? You can even rent different ones?
Here in Russia, if you live in a dorm, you get put in a room with three other people, and moving to a different one requires some bureaucracy happening.
I only stayed in dorms my first year, because they were super expensive. Mine was a single room not on main campus for almost $800/month. On main campus, there are multi-room (so 1 - 5 roommates), can be a bit cheaper (though being on main campus also costed more). It's pretty much a lottery though, so you take whatever room they assign you.
If you decide to leave the dorms, like I did, you have lots of options ranging from renting a nice studio apartment for ∼$1600 to a single basement room in a house for ∼$350 (what I did), and everything in between.
Edit: grammar
You're breaking my heart with those numbers.
I can eat well off $100 for a week here, and the rent for a decent mid-city apartment is about $200~250.
Yep...School was very expensive for me. I had a tonne of loans when I graduated, even though I had a fair bit of scholarships and bursaries.
Students loans sounds like a burden beyond reprehension.
If you haven't already, I hope you'll be able to show them the door soon enough.
Thanks! I was lucky enough to have a large portion of my loans forgiven, had family support and graduate during a booming economy, so my loans have long since been paid off.
If I am allowed a totebag with a laptop, my current book, my pen(cil) case and my swiss-army-knife journal, home is where I am.
I haven't really travelled all that much, but when I do, and even in daily commute, I realise that if I can study or procrastinate wherever I am, it feels like home.
Now I am nothing like a minimalist, my room is piling up with things that I own, books, tools, bits and pieces. But I feel these are the fundamentals, stuff I listed above.
I used to feel very partial to my books, they were the stuff I'd take wherever, even my tomb. I'd dread lending them. But at some point I had the realisation that I did not really care about the book as the object, especially if it is not something rare, which is better to keep at a library anyways.
This is how I feel, but I am yet to test this approach IRL, for an extensive period. But soon I will, and I hope my feelings will turn out to be true.
edit: lil emphasis
Wife
While the features mentioned by the others here certainly make a location feel more homey I find that any space immediately loses its "home" status if my wife is not there.
This is probably correct for me too. (though with my husband.)
Until I got married and we bought a house together if you told my google to "call home" it called my mom and dad's house.