Sad Grad Tips: Making Your Childhood Home Feel Like Home Again

Cars are packed up, maybe Dad even got a van. There’s boxes from county to county and bedding squashed under the back seats. Every bend you go round, the bottles of wine in the box in the boot that never got drunk (cheers Covid-19) clink together, chiming with the empty promises of grad jobs and career prospects. 

Then, you pull up at the front door of the house you grew up in. And that’s that. You’re a graduate. You’re unemployed (probably). And you don’t know what your next steps are. The natural instinct here is to curl up in bed with a glass of something to take the edge off and a 16 pack of Jammy Dodgers. You put on your comfort TV show and intermittently apply to 32 jobs at a time and question why your degree was so useless.

“So, how do we make this place of childhood memories and your parents decor feel like it is ours too?”

The bits and bobs dragged from house to house to house over your time at university, the rubbish accumulated in boxes and big blue Ikea bags is in a pile at the end of your bed and this room has walls just the wrong colour, blue tac marks and a tea stain on the carpet from when you were 17 and knocked it over getting ready for a night out. So, how do we make this place of childhood memories and your parents decor feel like it is ours too? The ‘now’ ours, not the 15 year old ours. I am no expert by any means, but here are a few things you can do to keep things that matter, but fit in with the world you left behind back home.

• Take the photos from your uni walls and place them in a photo albumI placed mine in with my childhood photos and crap I accumulated over the years, so now I have a big book that chronicles the last 20 years of my life, from baby pictures to drunken club photos with a hint of nipple sticking out. It’s a nice way to know you still have all those memories and tokens of days you need to keep and to see how they fit in with your childhood, with pages left for the memories still to make.
• Add some prints (in parent approved frames) to your wallMaybe your mum redecorated when you left, mine did. A very classy shade of grey that matches the yellow in the cushions nicely. I added some prints from my favourite bands and shows that I found from some lovely Instagram sellers and got some cheap frames that I painted a blush pink so they felt a little more me. It fits in with the classiness my mum likes but also brings a bit of me to the room. I even added some posters from my uni room just to carry over a bit more of my space.
• All of the cushions and blanketsCoziness and colour make things feel like home. So warm, so pretty and the time it takes to put all the cushions back in the morning might pass some of the time between job applications and LinkedIn surfing (I promise Jessica isn’t doing as well as it seems).
• I know it is said too much: But don’t work, write or apply for jobs from your bedWork in the kitchen, in the garden, anywhere you can. Just take some time out of your room. If too much time is spent in that one place, it is so easy to be all consumed by that space, that bed and that mentality. You will feel more comfortable in your home if you don’t just inhabit one part of it. However much you may want to shut yourself away in your room until you can afford a flat and get a grad job, you’ve gotta come out. Gotta be at home. Gotta enjoy this chunk of life.

It’s a strange time. Plans have changed. Life feels on hold. Everything feels strange and this is such a hard time to graduate. Take some time to do what you can to make this house your home again.

From one sad grad, to another.

 

Imogen Brighty-Potts

Featured image courtesy of @uncertainthink via Unsplash.