The struggle you face, single homemakers, is buying in. You have to buy in that beauty, coziness, and order are important. They’re not some far-off thing you’ll do when God blesses you with a family. They’re something you need to do right now. Nourish yourself so you can nourish others! Build a home now so that you can welcome people in permanently or just for the evening. This space that you own or rent is yours to play with, and by playing with it, you can learn how to help the homemakers around you. If you have practiced creating beauty, you can join the conversation about how to decorate. If you have practiced making a space cozy, you can help others make their space cozy. If you have created order, you can help others be organized. Doing these things in your home for yourself will help you be a sturdier woman. Beauty, coziness, and order are a calm, albeit finite, refuge from the Lord. Don’t neglect them just because it’s only you.

When our only goal is how quickly we can get something done and how easily we can do it, we stop caring about that thing. What does it matter if it is broken, destroyed, or trashed? When we haven’t poured any labor into something, we don’t care about what happens to it. And when we don’t care about what happens to it, we stop investing in it. It is like that rental house. The person who lives there doesn’t care. They don’t mow the lawn. They don’t beautify the property. It is an eyesore to the whole neighborhood. Or think about the difference between how you feel about the cucumber you harvested from your own garden vs. the one bought from the store. You probably don’t feel a thing about the one you bought at the store, but the one you harvested? You took a picture of it, crowed about it, and relished sharing it with family and friends. It matters to you because you put the hard work into growing it. This is true about raising chickens, too. Every egg matters because of the work you poured into that egg.

Details aren’t just about dirt and annoyance. Details are about beauty and fun. And if that doesn’t sum up homemaking, I don’t know what does.

Homemaking isn’t so much the work we do as it is the heart with which we do it.

God decorates every space in the world with beauty, from atoms to mountains, from wildflowers to sunsets. Every minute and major element of creation is festooned with beauty. How can we look at what our Father did and then look at our homes and throw up our hands or worse deride those who love decorating? The Father loves decorating, and so should we.

Porches should truly be considered rooms in our homes. They’re one more place we can gather and tend our families. They’re one more place we can help our people rest and regenerate. They’re one more place we can offer to friends and family to enjoy.

Bedrooms can be an interesting element in our homes because they’re utilized as places of privacy. But that privacy or training ground of privacy doesn’t remove them from our overarching responsibilities. We need to make sure we’re not neglecting these spaces, but embracing them!

The master bedroom is a key room in the house. Often it gets our last gasp of effort when it should get our first, because, single or married, it is the inner sanctuary of the home.

Atmosphere - an intangible yet important element of the home to cultivate. Your home has an atmosphere. It just does. With or without you noticing, all homes have a feel, a spirit, a soul.

From the floors to the seats, to the displays, closets, clothes, to the organization, to the plants, dishes, tools, and everything else, we should seek beauty, use beauty, create beauty. Not because it is forever beauty, but because God thinks temporary beauty is important and He has given us things to richly enjoy. We may live our lives here below the sun, but we have an above the sun attitude. We know it is temporary, but because we do it to glorify God, it takes on an element of the eternal.