Happier at Home - Gretchen Rubin

[goodreads]

Title: Happier at Home
Author: Gretchen Rubin
Genre: Non-fiction, memoir
Rating: 5/5
# pages: 320
Date read: October, 2012

One Sunday afternoon, as she unloaded the dishwasher, Gretchen Rubin felt hit by a wave of homesickness. Homesick - why? She was standing right in her own kitchen. She felt homesick, she realized, with love for home itself. "Of all the elements of a happy life," she thought, "my home is the most important." In a flash, she decided to undertake a new happiness project, and this time, to focus on home.

And what did she want from her home? A place that calmed her, and energized her. A place that, by making her feel safe, would free her to take risks. Also, while Rubin wanted to be happier at home, she wanted to appreciate how much happiness was there already.

So, starting in September (the new January), Rubin dedicated a school year - September through May - to making her home a place of greater simplicity, comfort, and love.

Fortunately I ended up enjoying this just as much as "The Happiness Project". I had wondered how much new stuff there would be to write on the subject, but I actually thought she managed quite nicely, and there were even some things I preferred about this book compared to THP (of course there were also some things I preferred about THP, but I had expected nothing else).

As the title indicates, this book focused on being happy at home. It wasn't about changing your life, it was about making your home a happy place to be. With a move coming up, this meant even more to me than it probably would have otherwise. Many of Gretchen Rubin's resolutions here were more of a 'one time deal' thing than actual resolutions. Also, they were a LOT more Gretchen-specific than those in THP. Not that that's a bad thing, it just meant there were some things I had a harder time relating to.

I was grateful to her for pointing me towards Demeter Fragrance Library though. They have a perfume called "New Zealand"!!!!