Feeling At Home: Celebrate Your New Space

Posted on 17. Aug, 2009 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Life, Home, Relocation
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When you relocate to a place where you don’t know a soul, move-in day can be a pretty anticlimactic affair. After all, you don’t (yet) have friends and colleagues who you can invite to a housewarming party, so how do you celebrate this new chapter in your life?

From solitary ritual to big move-in celebration, here are some suggestions to suit introverts, extroverts and everyone in between!

Design a ritual

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I am big on rituals. Moving into a new space and making it yours is a major transition. I think it’s important to take the time and care to declare “This is home now – I’m home”.

If you are spiritual, you may already have a ritual for this circumstance – from smudging to asking for blessings for your new home. If not, come up with your own little ceremony. Whether it is burning some incense and candles, or sitting in silence in each room for a few minutes, do what comes naturally and feels meaningful to you.

Deep cleaning

Even if the place you’re moving into is spotless, you may feel more at home once you’ve cleaned it from floor to ceiling yourself. Cleaning can be a form of meditation when you do it mindfully. Set an intention to infuse your new home with your energy and your personality, and clean away!

I always deep-clean the kitchen, the bathroom and the main bedroom when I move into a new place – house cleaning is not my favourite activity by far, so I choose to focus on the rooms that feel important / more intimate to me.

Introduce Yourself To Your Neighbours

On my first Christmas morning in Vancouver (I had moved in a week earlier) my next-door neighbours knocked on my door and invited me to their place so that I wouldn’t be alone on Christmas day. To this day, it is still one of my fondest memories of coming to Canada, and I have made a point of getting to know my neighbours ever since.

Maybe you can’t expect everyone to be as welcoming as my neighbours were, but you can certainly take the initiative and go introduce yourself!

Throw a party

Wait, didn’t we just say that a housewarming party wasn’t an option for, you know, lack of friends to invite? Well sure, but who says you have to invite people you already know?

Put a notice in your building and have an open house. Or take it up a notch and have a block party with other people in your street!

Obviously, having strangers over is not everyone’s idea of fun, and in certain communities this may not be appropriate for safety or cultural reasons. But if you’re comfortable with the idea, I can guarantee you that open houses can be a lot of fun – I have made some long-lasting friends and countless connections by attending block parties over the last few years!

Don’t wait until the last box is unpacked and the last trinket put away to do something that proclaims “I’m home!” There may never be a perfect time to celebrate your new home, but as soon as the move-in day chaos starts to recede and you are able to move around, take some time to claim the new space as yours.

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Emmanuelle

Images by Daniel Y. Go (top) and sokole oko (bottom), both via Flickr Creative Commons