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“Home – there is a magic in that little word. It is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits.”
Robert Southey
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Despite the appearance, I’m not going for sarcasm here. Finding a mental balance between the visual ideal and the human being ideal has been a vital journey for me. Have you found ways to remind yourself that life is “People before Things”?
Handmade Homeschool 
This is what I struggle most with as a mom, wife and homeschool parent. I have a difficult time letting go of not just the visual clutter and appearance of things, but the idealistic appearance of what being a mom, wife and educator should be.
Thank you for the reminder that home needs to be spiritual, personal, working dwelling, not the advertisement of home that is sold in society.
Here’s a quote I’d like to share that’s helped me lots. I do find that prayer or meditation helps keep the people in the front of things amidst the daily-doings of all live involves. The book is one about prayer, but it’s not a how-to book. Even if one isn’t Christian, I think the concept can resonate. The idea is that in making time for prayer (or meditation) we end up making time for others without more effort – it just happens b/c of of our changed disposition, perhaps.
” One of the great crises of our day is that people are no longer capable of finding time for one another, time to be with one another. Here is something that causes so many deep wounds. So many children are enclosed within themselves, disillusioned and damaged, because their parents never learned to spend time with them, with nothing else to do except be with the child. They look after the child, but they are always doing something else or are preoccupied, never entirely there, never totally available. And the child senses this and suffers. In learning to give time to God, we will certainly become more able to find time to be there for one another. Our attentiveness to God will teach us to be attentive to others. . . . Mental prayer will give one the grace to live out every moment of life in a much more fruitful way. Time given to God is not time stolen from others. . . . On the contrary, [it] guarantees the capacity to be present to others and love them. . . . the love of prayerful souls is the most attentive, delicate, disinterested, sensitive to other people’s suffering, and capable of consoling and comforting.” From TIME FOR GOD by Jacques Philippe