The Joy of Second-Hand Furniture Shopping with your Spouse

On Making a House a Home

I am moving house for the third time in two years, and for the third time it’s an intercontinental move. The first time I was three months pregnant, the second I had a four-month old, and this time I have a one-and-a-half-year-old and I’m six months pregnant, again. For the last two years, I have lived in furnished apartments. This has been much easier than attempting to ship furniture across the Atlantic, but it’s also made it hard to completely feel at home. Now, for the first time since getting married, I’ll get the chance to arrange everything in my new home exactly as I wish.

This thought has brought me a lot of joy during a very uncertain season of life. I spend most of my time thinking about very abstract things and worrying about our society’s woes, so there is something wonderfully concrete and tangible about planning the furnishing of my new home. One day a few weeks ago, my husband and I stumbled upon a beautiful second-hand escritoire in a charity shop (or thrift store for my North American friends). It looked a bit tattered, but we fell in love with it. We started thinking about how nicely it would go in our bedroom, functioning as a desk for our remote work needs. After some pondering, we took the escritoire home, where my mother helped me to polish it and make it look new. Here it is in all its splendor:

Now, I'm not sharing my interior design preferences on the Internet merely out of pride (although I do think my husband and I have good taste in furniture!). Rather, I want to use this mundane incident in my daily life to reflect on the joy of sharing homemaking responsibilities with your spouse. In a recent essay on homemaking for Public Discourse, Serena Sigillito has argued that if we think of homemaking simply as the responsibility of stay-at-home mothers, we are missing the point that both fathers and mother should see family life as their first responsibility. She writes that:

It’s time to embrace the centrality of motherhood and fatherhood to our identities as women and men, working to restore a cultural sense that home and hearth are important sources of both personal fulfillment and social flourishing.

I believe what Sigillito is describing can happen down to the level of both spouses taking an active interest in the arrangement and beautification of the home. There is a particular kind of joy to be found in choosing what your home will look like with your spouse, in finding and treasuring items that will be such a big part of your domestic memories once you’ve grown old together. One day, I like to imagine, our children will think of our escritoire as the desk mum and dad used when they needed to write their boring emails. They’ll think of our kitchen table as the place we all had meals together and they threw food everywhere as toddlers. Our bed to them will be the comforting place they ran to after having a nightmare. Every piece of our furniture will one day have a history, and picking those pieces out is something worth sharing with your spouse.

Now, let me be clear: it's ok to not make every household management decision as a couple. In my marriage, I decide what we eat daily because I happen to love cooking, while my husband deals with most of the paperwork because he's much more patient with it than I could ever be. In those ways, we fall into gender stereotypes, and that’s ok as well. The point is, that the home should be a special and cherished place by both spouses. Like Sigillito suggests, homemaking isn’t just for mothers, and definitely not just for stay-at-home mothers. A mother and father make a home together. So, if you’re already married, I strongly encourage you to find and redecorate an old piece of furniture together. It’ll be good for your marriage. And if you’re single or dating, why not take a potential spouse second-hand furniture shopping? It may be an excuse to test their willingness to embrace the noble art of homemaking with you in the future.