Fionnuala Jones: Ignore Pinterest — a home is a place to live, not just to show

Fionnuala Jones: It’s not long before you’re caught up in the comparison trap, scrolling. Pictures: Gareth Chaney

“You’ve gone so house proud, it’s hilarious,” my best friend Val told me as I apologised for the state of another room in our house.

None of the rooms required an apology — I’d done my standard panic clean-and-tidy before she arrived, but it didn’t feel like enough. It was certainly a lot better than my days in student accommodation, when moving out would have required an archaeological excavation team.

Myself and my fiancé Cian are coming up to two years in our house in Dublin. I’d been renting across the county since leaving college, moving six times in six years. I worked two full-time jobs, and even with that, I wouldn’t have been able to buy without Cian. We spent months looking at houses that would have put us into debt to make them habitable, before we found The One – a reasonably new build that required nothing bar cosmetic touch-ups. 

We put in the offer, and waited with bated breath. When Cian called me to say we’d gone sale agreed, I felt every muscle in my body unclench. What a relief! Little did I know the summer that lay ahead would involve relentlessly calling our solicitors, begging for a scrap of an update.

It would be another three months before we moved in. The day we did, we accidentally set off the house alarm and hadn’t thought to ask the estate agent for the code (the neighbours love us). When we eventually got in, I ran my fingers along the bare walls, feeling an unspeakable gratitude for what we had.

It’s hard to remember that sometimes, though. Going from the instability of renting, where you can’t darken a wall with a Command strip, to a place where you can destroy a room is overwhelming. We painted the whole place off-white upon moving in, fearing we’d paint a room purple in a haze of homeowner’s euphoria. Who are we now in this place we can finally call home?

So much of our money was spent on the actual purchase of the house that we forgot we would also have to spend to make the house our own. Every purchase, from the most inane to the most thrilling, cost hundreds of euro. This, coupled with my decision to start working for myself, meant we spent the first few months sitting on camp chairs, watching TV.

Fionnuala Jones: Why should I have to apologise for my own taste?

It’s not long before you’re caught up in the comparison trap, scrolling. Pinterest and Instagram looking at immaculate houses from people with impeccable taste. Another Instagrammer bought around the same time as we did, and recently shared a reel showcasing the work they’ve done to their house — all pristine paintwork, precise carpentry, gold furnishings. It took all my strength not to fling my phone into traffic.

In two years, we’ve “finished” (is a house ever finished?) one room — the living room. But even then, my eye hyper-focuses on the mess. There’s paint splatters on the ceiling, areas where I couldn’t remove frog tape, a chipped skirting board from a fallen frame. 

I finally found time to do some DIY in our guest bedroom recently, and more of the primer ended up on the floor than on the panelling. I couldn’t see my good effort beyond my amateur mistakes. The details that no sane person sees or looks for when crossing the threshold are the things that haunt my dreams — this silent, non-existent judgement.

It feels like a specifically female responsibility — beyond having a clean home, the home you’ve broken your back to buy now must look immaculate at every angle, at any time of day. 

Decorating and design do not come easy to someone who dresses like a children’s TV presenter and a circus clown ran into each other at speed. But why should I have to apologise for my own taste?

None of it is helped by the sheer ridiculousness of social media. I recently came across an article about fridgescaping. What’s fridgescaping, I hear you ask? Fridgescaping involves decorating the inside of your fridge. The writer suggests using flowers and framed pictures to ensure the place where you keep your food is aesthetic enough for nosey friends and family.

What is home if it’s also not a place to rot? A place to let the clothes pile up occasionally, on beds and on armchairs? Surely, the insanely long and hard journey wasn’t for me to spend hours on Instagram feeling depressed about some other woman’s throw pillows? There should be a time limit imposed on the question “how’s the house?” — you get a week after move-in and then you can’t ask again for three years.

I love our home. I love the cat hair that clings to every surface. I love that if I inadvertently strip paint off a wall, I can fix it (eventually). I love eating dinner every evening at our kitchen table where we hear about each other’s day. I love the uninhibited garden that would probably make Diarmuid Gavin cry. Let him sob — we successfully grew a handful of garden peas this year, the joy of eating them was unparalleled.

Show homes are called that for a reason — they’re there to sell an illusion, a vibe, a malleable future. A place to make your own, in your own time. Don’t get so caught up in Pinterest’s illusions of grandeur that you forget that a home is a place to live, not just to show.