Many speak of this historical moment as a golden opportunity to stop and review some parameters of their lives and the “world system”. Let’s face it, we would have happily spared it, but the fact remains that spending all the time we have inside the house remains a great challenge, from any point you see it and however you think it. And this time should not be spent in a frustrating wait, it must be transformed into something constructive.

We are imprisoned inside the house. Only now do we see the things we don’t like and those that don’t work, and only now are we evaluating, with the right attention, the small or large changes that we would like to make. Remember that even the home can get sick, not from coronavirus but from our bad habits: the accumulation, the neglect, the lack of a conscious perception of the quality of the spaces.

We look around with different eyes, because until the day before the lockdown – let’s face it – we lived the house as if it were a hotel: we went out in the morning after a nice shower and we returned in the evening, at the end of the working day. Just a bite, a series on Netflix and then in bed. The days followed one another all the same, monotonous repetitions broken only by the thought of the next holiday.

We don’t say “stop and breathe”, because you are already stopped, we tell you to take three good deep breaths, clearing the mind and spirit of melancholy – a real virus – and to act to improve life starting from home. Let’s start with the simplest things, lightening and rearranging spaces, decluttering and space organizing, our friends would say overseas.

Organize a real tour of the house, open each drawer and analyze what is inside. You will find that you find things and objects that you didn’t even remember owning. Keep what has real value for you and put it in order. The rest throw it. Did you know that the accumulation of things weighs down our mind as well as space? It is a real pathology.

Do the same thing in the kitchen, another place where you tend to abandon things without real use. Empty one door at a time and proceed with the same method as for the drawers. And before you put what you want to keep in its place, give it a clean. The same goes for the fridge!

Want to talk about the bathroom? We see some of them with sun creams from the 1980s, preserved as if they were the ampoules of Queen Cleopatra. Not to mention the empty bottles of perfumes: “we keep them because they are beautiful”, isn’t it? But the house is not like the universe that tends to infinity, the house is a finite space. Let’s respect it, otherwise we will be overwhelmed by an avalanche that will bury us.

Let’s move on to the wardrobes and the wardrobe. This is perhaps one of the most critical areas of accumulation, because we can’t get rid of the clothes that don’t fit us anymore, hoping to be able to give them a second chance, or because we say: “maybe it will be back in fashion!”. Be honest with yourself and have the courage to throw away or give away anything you haven’t worn in the past year. Here, too, take everything out, browse it, and keep only what you use, putting it back in its place with a logical order. Less is more.

We close with the horror film most seen in the homes of Italians, and not only, whose title is “The library”. This furniture is considered the last chance of accumulation, the proven proof of our inability to eliminate what is not needed or that does not contribute to the aesthetic quality of the space. Moreover, it often has the misfortune of being positioned in the living room, in the most important room, the one we use to welcome our guests. We have time, no alibi, let’s dismantle it completely. How long have we been doing it? Here the work will be double because we will not only have to eliminate what is not needed but we will also have to work to put everything back in the right position, thinking about functionality and aesthetics. The bookcase is like a painting to be painted: the order of objects cannot be random, it must be thought.

One last thought: whether you live alone, as a couple or as a family, you have probably noticed that there are no spaces. You are probably experiencing daily promiscuity badly, especially in smaller houses. Even if you don’t have a room for everyone, start thinking if it is not possible to create “corners” to be able to read a book in peace, perhaps in the bedroom, or if the open space cannot be divided in any way , so as to create environments with a different function.

We are all living the house much more intensely and getting to know it well, perhaps for the first time. We use this new awareness to regain a new existential balance, looking for a true harmony that starts from ourselves. Renzo Piano wrote in these days: “We will have to build a better world”. Why don’t we start from our house? There are no more excuses!