The fine art of pottering
And why it's good for the soul/home
For many years, somewhere in the about page on my websites, portfolios, even in the bio of my books, I’ve included “can often be found drinking wine and rearranging the furniture” or words to that effect. Remove the wine part, as I’m doing less of that right now, but rearranging the furniture is still going strong and for me it falls under the category of my favourite pastime, pottering.
I can easily waste fill half a day at home, gliding happily from one small task to the next, calm and unhurried
Watering the house plants leads me to pop to the garden for some soil to top up the plant pots. There I notice a hedge that needs cutting back a bit which leads me to the garage for the hedge trimmer. While there I spot the growing collection of paint pots and remember I need to move the red shelf to the garage to store them and also touch up the paint on the bedroom door. While in the bedroom looking at the door, I pass my dressing table and notice it’s a bit dusty and when I clear it off and give it a clean I find a spoon (!?) amongst the perfumes and creams and put it back in the cutlery drawer where I see it could use a declutter. And just like that I’ve spent the morning pottering.
Tell me you can relate.
My favourite day/time to potter is Saturday morning, with Sunday a close second. On weekdays I have to be careful that my pottering isn’t just procrastinating - they are closely linked and boundaries must be drawn, hence the Saturday morning pottering bliss. It’s allowed! It’s not avoidance! It’s pretty much scheduled therefore completely guilt free!
When you make a career out of arranging objects as I have - which at its core is what styling and set design are - you obviously enjoy that element of the job. And I do. So it’s difficult for me to know if other people potter as much as I do. All I know is that it is one of my life’s simple pleasures along with reading for hours in the night when I can’t sleep, watching films and eating snacks on the sofa when my kids visit, drawing in black ink on good paper. Simple things where I lose track of time.
By its very nature pottering is to go about things in a leisurely and pleasurable manner. Sometimes it means ticking off a few odds and ends from your to-do list but in a chill, no biggie kind of way. Other times it means listening to music or a podcast (or nothing) and seeing where the morning/afternoon/evening takes you. You pop in a load of laundry, tidy a kitchen drawer, deadhead a plant, read an article. At its best it is blissfully unhurried and often even meditative, but as I’ve described it can also be accidentally productive. Things are being achieved but in small increments and without setting out to ‘get things done’.
This makes me think of the Japanese word kaizen which is the concept of making small changes for continuous improvement, typically used to streamline businesses, but equally valuable in the home.
When my kids were little, my house was just a teeny bit more chaotic, full and untidy than it is now. But my strategy was more about small, but regular clean-ups rather than letting it get out of control messy and then doing a mammoth weekend long overhaul. I can’t live with too much disorder but I’m also not a neat freak and back then I didn’t want my kids’ creativity to be stifled worrying about making a mess. But equally I didn’t want them growing up in a mess.
My love for a morning of pottering probably started when my family was young. A rare hour or two at home alone was my idea of heaven, as I’m sure many parents would attest. A quiet house, no interruptions, no agenda.
Now that the kids have left home and I live alone, everything is exactly how I want it to be. Except of course it’s not. There are countless jobs still to be done in terms of the renovation - both DIY and hired help - and many will take time to complete. So the pottering has become even more beneficial in terms of crossing things off that list. Again, this isn’t about me pushing you to ‘get things done’ in this productivity-mad culture we live in, but if it can be part of a ritual you enjoy then no harm done.
There is a lot to be said for slowly but regularly chipping away at a list, especially if you allow yourself to take a time limit off some or many of the jobs on it. This slower approach is new-ish to me in terms of home interiors - as a stylist for shoots, speed is key. And as a result I can be extremely impatient in my own home. I want it done NOW (said about everything and yet many things remain not done two years into my house renovation). But I’ve also learned (and written about in my books) that slow decorating can be better in terms of not making costly mistakes when rushed.
When my kids were little I’d think nothing of redoing their room in a weekend, complete with a hand painted mural of a tree and little curtains sewn for their bunkbeds. I was young and had boundless energy. I also used to make the dog’s food in batches from scratch. So yeah. I was that person. Things are different now and pottering away slowly is more my game.
To be fair, chipping away doesn’t work for everything (or for every person or lifestyle). Sometimes you just have to get stuck in and get a job done. I find the messier a job, the more I want to get it done in one go.
A few things on my list that I’ll work into my slow lane pottering time:
*Organise and declutter crockery cupboard (declutter one day, clean/dust another day, rearrange another day)
*Organise all the books in the reading mezzanine (I know I’ll end up getting sidetracked by books I haven’t seen for a while so why pretend it will be a quick job)
*Sort out the drawers in the kitchen island (this is the perfect project to potter away at over a few Saturdays)
*Catch up on This Cultural Life podcast (the Andrew Scott episode, because Sherlock’s Moriarty, Fleabag’s Hot Priest and Hamlet is quite an accomplishment)
* Make living room curtains. For some this would be an all in one go job, but I can’t dedicate that much time at once (cut fabric one day, make lining another, sew pieces together another. )
And a few that might start as pottering but really need to be done in one fell swoop:
*Sand and paint upper section of the wall behind the bed (once that bed is moved I do NOT want to move it back until the job is done)
*Dismantle and move the red metal shelf to the garage for storing all the paint pots (this cannot be half-assed)
*Digging up the ivy that’s strangling all my trees (if I do this in increments it will regrow before I get back to it!)
*Sorting out the pantry - when it was built last year I just shoved everything in willy-nilly and haven’t had a chance to organise (better to do it all at once since I use it every day and once emptied it will cause kitchen chaos)
For the most part though, pottering doesn’t require a list.
It’s those treasured moments where I have no plan and can just be at peace in my home, doing whatever feels good for as long as I want. It’s a real privilege and I never take it for granted.
Oh how I love to potter - and now that I’m retired any day can be a pottering day 😄
I would way rather embrace this vibe than thinking I’m ADHD! I am such a potterer, as much as I can be with 4 of my 6 kids in my home. There really is nothing better than this!