The Goldilocks Home: How To Find Your ‘Just Right’

Most homes are set up in ways that are always going to feel slightly ‘off’. It’s not your fault – it’s just how it happens! This article helps you to understand why it’s feeling that way, and how to find the sweet spot, with a little help from Goldilocks!

It’s 7:40 on a Tuesday, and you’re standing in front of the wardrobe reaching past fourteen things to get to the one you actually want – again.

The set up is fine really, it’s just that things are never quite where you’d put them if you were setting them up today.

But nevertheless, you get dressed, grab your coat, and leave the house.

Nothing about getting ready that day would make it onto a list of problems you’ve got were you to write one out.

In fact, it’s likely that you’d struggle to explain what’s actually wrong if someone asked.

But you feel it, most days – that low-level sense that parts of your home don’t quite fit. It’s always just slightly… ‘off’.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to feel like this, and the first step to changing it is to understanding the ‘why’.

It’s usually one of three causes:

The first: your home is set up for you. But it’s still set up for the version of you who you used to be. Past-you arranged it, past-you’s life shaped it, and past-you’s systems are still running in it, even though you’ve moved on.

The second: your home is again set up for you, but it’s a version of you who you’re planning to become. Future-you’s aspirations are embedded in the storage solutions, the room layouts, the systems designed for a more sorted version of you that hasn’t quite materialised yet.

The third: your home isn’t even set up for you at all if you’re being honest. It’s set up for someone else, what you think it ‘should’ look like, what another person feels is the right way of doing it. It felt good to do it – but now you’re living in it, it’s not working on any level.

The fact is, the only right way of doing something in your own home, is to do it for you, and the you that’s actually here living in this moment in time.

Finding the ‘just-right’ isn’t about perfection. It’s about getting honest with what you need and I liken it to Goldilocks problems with that porridge she was eating…

Too Cold: When ‘Past-You’ is still running the home

Past-you built things that genuinely worked, for the life that existed at the time.

• The clothes organised around the 9-5 working wardrobe.
• The morning routine that ran like clockwork when the children were a particular age.
• The chore split agreed when someone’s working hours were different.
• The storage system that fit the old house and got transplanted into this one, approximately.

All of these were good decisions. Sensible ones. They worked, and so they stayed.

The reason they worked, though, was that they reflected the life being lived, at the time.

But life moves. Jobs change. Children grow. Routines drift. A relationship shifts. Health does something unexpected. Working from home becomes working from an office, or the reverse. And the home keeps holding the shape of a life that’s no longer quite the one being lived in it.

The signs are subtle, which is part of what makes this so easy to miss.

You don’t look at the wardrobe and think: this is set up for a version of me from three years ago. You just notice that getting dressed takes slightly longer than it should, that you’re always working around something to get to something else, that the system technically works but creates friction you can’t quite explain.

You don’t think: that morning routine was designed for when my youngest still needed help at breakfast. You just notice that mornings feel harder than they used to, that there’s always a moment of scramble, that the routine that was once automatic now takes more effort to maintain.

Daily friction without an obvious cause. That’s past-you, still running the show from a life that’s moved on without updating the settings.

Too cold feels like: the sense that things are harder than they used to be without knowing why.

Too Hot: When ‘Future-You’ has already moved in

Future-you is extremely capable. She’s more organised, more consistent, more disciplined than current-you has so far managed to be.

She batch cooks. She processes paperwork the day it arrives. She has a morning routine that runs without friction and an evening wind-down that actually winds down. She’s, frankly, impressive.

She’s also entirely hypothetical.

And yet, her fingerprints are all over most people’s homes:

• The filing system that works… if you deal with every piece of paper immediately.
• The wardrobe organisation that holds…. if everything is folded and returned exactly so after washing.
• The reading nook set up for the reading habit you’re definitely going to build.
• The home office configured for the focused, productive work sessions that will absolutely happen… once things calm down.

These systems aren’t bad ideas. They’re just built for the ideal life you think you’re going to live when you build it – but you’re not going to change to fit your environment as easily as your environment being set up for how you live.

And in the meantime, You-Now has to navigate around them. The filing system you’re not maintaining creates guilt every time you walk past it. The wardrobe setup that’s come apart at the seams makes getting dressed feel like a small failure. The meal planning board, blank for three months, is a daily reminder of an intention that hasn’t become a habit.

A home set up for future-you doesn’t just fail to help. It actively makes the current experience of living there slightly worse, by populating it with evidence of things you meant to do and haven’t as yet.

Too hot feels like: a home full of good intentions that creates low-level guilt rather than ease.

Too Different: When ‘Should-You’ has let others decide what you want.

Living in a ‘Should’ home is easily done. I’ve been there myself – and it’s dangerous because it feels right in the moment, until you’re honest with yourself.

This is the stuff you try and implement because you’ve seen it on Instagram and it worked well for them, or you saw a pantry organised beautifully that in reality for you is just too much hard work to keep on top of in your busy days.

It’s the things that someone else says is right. The little thought in your head that you should do it a certain way, lay it out a certain way, live a certain way.

In porridge terms, it’s a porridge made with milk and with added berries and honey when you like it with water and plain. The former version is the one that looks gorgeous, the one people say is the right way to do it because it’s interesting and more yummy – but you don’t like it at all. You may be polite and eat it in someone else’s home, but you deserve to have it done your way in your own… right?

Yup. Unapologetically yours.

Too different looks like: somewhere you can’t relax, because it doesn’t reflect you in function and/or form (and if you’re honest, it never did).

The Goldilocks Problem

Here’s what makes this genuinely tricky.

Past-you, Future-you, and Should-you all feel right – to some extent:

• Past–you built real things that worked – so it feels wasteful or defeatist to dismantle them. Overarching feeling is one of guilt.
• Future–you has real aspirations – so it feels negative or limiting to stop setting things up around them. Overarching feeling is of failure.
• Should–you is inspired by others, and trusts their opinions, so if it’s good for them, it is for you too, right? It feels like you’re failing if it doesn’t work as you expected. Overarching feeling is one of duty.

And as a result, most people end up living in a home that’s a complicated mixture of all of them.

Some systems from the last chapter of life, still running. Some aspirations from the next one, half-implemented. And that pantry shelf that’s trying desperately to hold on to the clear labelled containers and keep them neat because that would be the best way to do it (whether you like it or not).

And then along comes You-Now, the actual person who has to live in all of this, trying to fit yourself around it all, never quite at home as a result.

The Goldilocks home is another way of talking about the You-Now Home™. It doesn’t try to honour past-you’s systems or future-you’s aspirations. And it definitely doesn’t try to change yourself to fit others versions of what’s the right way to do things. It simply tries to answer a different question entirely:

What do you actually need, in this home, for your life – right now?

Not what worked before. Not what might work eventually. Not what others will tell me to do/have/feel. What ACTUALLY works today, for the version of you that actually exists, with the life you’re actually living.

That question sounds easy doesn’t it?

But answering it is hard, because it means setting aside nostalgia for systems that worked once, aspiration for the person you’re planning to be, and a sense of duty to do things like they should be done – and instead, looking clearly at who’s actually here.

It’s about getting really honest with yourself.

What ‘Just Right’ actually looks like

It doesn’t have to look any specific way. In fact, it may not look particularly impressive to anyone else at all.

‘Just right’ looks like a home where things look and feel right for you and how you live.

Where things land where you’d naturally put them, because that’s where they actually belong.

Where the morning runs with minimal effort, because the routine is built around how the morning actually goes.

Where the systems work on a normal busy weekday, not just a relaxing Sunday, because they were designed with tired you in mind.

It looks like a kitchen arranged around how you actually cook right now, not how you cooked two years ago, not how you might cook if you had more time.

A wardrobe that makes getting dressed easy for the actual life being lived in it, with the actual job, the actual body, the actual week in mind.

It looks like a home that doesn’t make you feel behind, or dreaming of the future, or like you’re managing the aftermath of someone else’s decisions.

It’s a home that feels like an exhale when you walk through the door, because it reflects you, because it was built for you, by you, around the reality of your actual life.

That’s not a small thing.

That feeling, of a home that genuinely feels right is one of the most underrated sources of daily ease there is.

So, how do You find your ‘Just Right’?

How do you create your Goldilocks home?

Well – it starts with noticing firstly whether it’s your home at all – or has been built based on someone else’s ideas and opinions. (Is the porridge what you actually like and what you would order if you had completely free choice?).

Is it made for YOU.

Then, ask yourself which temperature your home’s running at right now.

If it’s too cold – if the friction you’re feeling comes from systems and setups that belong to an earlier chapter – then the work you need to start with is updating and tweaking things. Identifying what’s still running on past-you’s settings and making the deliberate decision to bring it forward to meet you where you are now. Not tearing it all down. Just asking yourself whether this particular thing still makes sense for the life you’re actually in.

If it’s too hot – if the friction comes from systems designed for a future version of you that keeps not arriving – the work that’s needed is being honest and realistic with yourself. It’s about letting go of stuff with misaligned aspirations. And don’t get me wrong – it’s absolutely NOT about giving up on growth and working towards the dreams and goals you have. It’s just about stopping the current version of you from being made to feel inadequate by the version that you’re living with every day instead of allowing yourself to enjoy it properly as you deserve to.

is it made for NOW?

And in all reality – most homes run at both temperatures.

A bit too cold in some rooms, a bit too hot in others. The past-you wardrobe alongside the future-you home office. The old chore split running alongside the aspirational meal planning system.

So your job isn’t to fix everything at once.

It’s to start noticing, room by room, system by system, which temperature each thing is running at. And then make one small, deliberate adjustment towards just right.

Not because it needs to be perfect. Because you live here. Right now. And that’s worth the work.

The Porridge That’s ‘Just Right’

Goldilocks didn’t settle.

She didn’t eat porridge she didn’t like the flavour of, nor say the too-cold porridge was fine, or talk herself into liking the too-hot one. She kept going until she found the one that was actually right – and she knew it immediately.

P.S. The first step to creating a home that feels right is to make it feel good. This will give you more motivation to carry on – so take a look HERE to discover exactly how!