Photo courtesy of Evelyn Paris on Unsplash

Do you ever tour model homes? I don’t mean with an intent to purchase, but rather, just to see new and clever concepts from builders as well as their decorators’ creative ideas.

For the second year my daughter and I visited Richmond, Virginia’s Homearama. This year there were seven new homes in an area called Magnolia Green.

Since my daughter works for a custom home builder and I designed my current home, we both have a strong interest in houses.

I do believe part of the WOW! factor of a model home is the essence of perfect completeness.

Let’s face it. Here is what you will NEVER see in a model home:

• A laundry basket of dirty socks and underwear waiting to be loaded into the washer
• Breakfast dishes in the sink with fried egg stuck to them
• Dog nose prints on the windows
• Dried toothpaste on the bathroom vanity
• A kitchen counter stacked with two days of mail, expired coupons for Kohl’s, and 17 recipes torn from magazines

Instead, here’s what you WILL see in a model home:

• Cabinet pulls without one tiny smudge of stickiness
• Pantries with food decoratively arranged such as cake mix boxes slanted at angles
• Spotlessly clean bathrooms large enough to double as conference rooms
• Counter tops that glisten and shine so dazzlingly clean that you may feel a compelling urge to perform a lab experiment on them

We can feel a tad depressed when we start comparing our own home to these Stepford-wife type model homes. We start wanting that essence of perfect completeness.

Comparing is never a good idea. I believe it should be banned. Most of us fall short when we compare ourselves to someone else. Some of what we compare against others includes our looks, our bodies, our mates, our children, our jobs, and yes, our homes.

We look at air-brushed models in magazines and wish we had fewer wrinkles. We read a Facebook post about a super-flexible 90-year-old woman who has done yoga all her life and ask ourselves, “Why can’t I bend my body like that?”

Would you feel better about your house if I told you I can’t remember the last time every room in my house was clean at the same time? I come from a long line of women who believed that a spotless home was at the top of the “must do” list. It’s not that my house is dirty; it just wouldn’t live up to the spotless standard.

There are other things I would rather do than clean, such as write to my nice tribe of readers. (I do appreciate each one of you!)

So please stop comparing. Those wrinkles at the outside edges of your eyes come from smiling so much. That’s good. And the reason you can’t bend your body like the lifetime yoga practitioner is because you would break something.

Straighten your “Home Sweet Home” sign, run a dust cloth over it, and say out loud, “Why, yes it is my sweet home, dirty laundry, dishes in the sink,  dog nose prints and all.”

Photo courtesy of Pixabay