Making your apartment a home

I've lived in this apartment for almost four months now, but today when I opened the door coming back from the gym, I realized this was the first time I really thought of it as "home" and not "the apartment" in my head.

I'm not sure there's any one thing that prompted my thinking that, but here's some things I've been trying to do to make it feel more like home lately:

-Cooking and eating most dinners at home: The more I eat out or spend all night out drinking instead of eating, the less I feel like I use my kitchen and the stuff in it. This gives it a sense of temporariness, like a hotel.

-Keep your unit at your own level of cleanliness: My parents are naturally a lot cleaner people than I am, and for the first few years of my adult life, I felt a need to have my apartment impeccably clean. Now, I like having a messy desk, especially on my busy workdays on Wednesday and Thursday. It's my mess, though, I clean it up once a week and start over.

-Stay home some weekend nights: If you start to see your place as just a place to crash after a long night, that's what it will be. I feel like acting like a grown-up by spending one Friday or Saturday every month doing laundry and reading a book makes me feel more comfortable here.

-Find just one place to do work: Nothing stresses me out more than working on my laptop in bed, which seems weird, but too me it indicates that I'm too tired to sit upright in a chair at a desk and do work, so I should probably just be sleeping. Working in front of the TV, if I'm doing actual work I'm getting paid for, feels like I'm ripping off my employers and myself since I'm more than likely doing a half- assed  job.

-Develop a sense of neighborhood: I've been going out to lunch in my neighborhood once a week so I can get to know some of the little sandwich shops and ethnic joints nearby. My goal is to have eaten at every place east of the L and between Diversey and Belmont over the next two years. Of course by then there will be a dozen new places. But at least when my suburban friends and relatives drop by I don't feel like a doofus for not knowing half a dozen places to match their individual tastes.

-Fix problems right away: leaky faucets, slow drains, broken ACs, funny smells all make it so you're not proud of your home and that's just not cool. If you're renting, get the landlord to fix it. If you bought, pay someone to fix it. The little things only get worse.

-Keep your bathroom clean: Maybe this is just me, but I don't feel like a place is home if I can't take a bath there.  Just sayin'.

-Put up a Christmas tree! Again maybe it's just me, but the hour or two it took me to set up and decorate an artificial pre-lit tree never seems worth it before you do it but always does afterward.

I also think the weather is making me feel more at home. In summer  I could spend all day out by the Lakeshore and never come home, but in winter, it's important to have this feeling.