Purposeful Summer Projects

There are a lot of words, books, articles, blogs, etc. floating around that discuss how to live authentically or how to live a life of belonging, meaning, service or courageously (you can tell I read A LOT of leadership and self-development books). I have decided to focus on living a life of purpose. Purpose is a strong word, an intentional word, a word full of functionality and meaning. To me, living a life of purpose means to intently focus on meaningful work and relationships. For example, focusing on meaningful and impactful work that helps others, gives to other, impacts the greater good; being able to collaborate with others; to help produce something meaningful.

As a wife, mother and homemaker, purposeful takes on another meaning which includes; spending time with family, making memories, intently setting time aside for updating, cleaning, and investing in our home, etc. Continually making our house a home that is filled with calmness (peace), love and joy. Part of this purposeful work is also rooted in functionally and need. The house needs to be updated, cleaned, organized, etc. routinely or it does provide for these adjectives (calmness, love and joy).

Each summer, we set out with a number of internal goals and purposeful projects to help add to development and updating of the house.

At the beginning of this summer, I started with a long list of small projects and updates for our farmhouse. As of August, we were able to accomplish a number of these projects. They were all part of my list of purposeful actions and priorities to our home this year. See the list below:

We updated the kitchen hardware from these cheap, round knobs and pulls to more modern, brass gold knobs and pulls. This was a simple update, which took maybe an hour. Which they can be purchased at Home Depot or online at Amazon. They look amazing and this is a cheap/fast upgrade.

The bedroom nightstands needed updated to match a new bed headboard and new contemporary/modern lights on the nightstand. I could not find a nightstand/side table that I liked so we repainted side tables a moss green. It added color, and the lamps tie into the headboard. We also invested in a leather, overside Pottery Barn chair for the bedroom.

White cabinet in the foyer needed updated. There is a lot of white in our home and I am not brave enough to paint walls yet (in the living room, kitchen or foyer/ the bedrooms are all painted). So, I decided to paint this white cabinet a deep navy blue with a high shine. Talk about making an impact statement. When the sunlight hits it, it looks beautiful. Still in need of a large floor rug with it.

We also updated our front door planters and redid our son’s room from trains to a camp room. All in all, we are done with updates! Lots of work but always worth it and again, it all serves a purpose. It is all functional and purposeful work that increases and value of the home, but also the look and décor of the house needs to change from time to time. Below is gallery of these many projects.