In October, we celebrated 18 years of marriage. As I toasted bread for breakfast, I recalled how that toaster was a wedding present. As was the coffee cup we sipped from, and the placemats on the table. The pumpkin-themed tablecloth and candlestick holders were inherited from my grandmother.

We’ve moved seven times since getting married. Every time, the towering stack of boxes reminds us how much we’ve accumulated and how much we still carry forward. Some things make it through every move; others get left behind along the way.

Sustainable homes go beyond using solar or reclaiming materials. It’s an intentional process of rhythms, habits, and acquiring what sustains us through each phase of life.

Moving isn’t a sustainable practice. Not just the waste of packing materials, but each time you find some things that fit in one house don’t work with the next. 

Somewhere between the third apartment and the sixth house, I noticed the pieces we kept that had earned their place. In this way, we can make moving and forming our homes more sustainable.

Reuse What Moves With You

When you move as often as we have, belongings become traveling companions. A few made it part of our journey, like our first dining room set that moved with us through three states. Others made the full journey with us, like the solid dresser that was my husband’s as a kid, that our child uses. 

Each piece may not have fully fit “the look” of where we lived, but each served a purpose. Every move, we attempted to use as much of what we already had. The sofas have survived four moves. A bookcase made it through six before sadly being discarded.

Some we repurposed to fit different rooms. The dresser went from the office to a guest room to the child’s room. The painting from our dining room that went to the bedroom and back to the dining room. We repainted a tree decor piece from our bedroom in one house to fit the living room in our next. The table from the playroom moved to the patio and now back into the playroom. 

These lasting pieces tell a story. Extending the life of what you already have by adapting it is a quiet sustainability.

Value the Slow Setup

We’ve been in our current house for eighteen months, and it’s still not “done.” The patio furniture isn’t right yet. The hallway needs attention. I haven’t found the perfect bar stools or figured out where all the books should go. There’s no media console. Our upstairs bonus room is an amalgamation of scattered Lego sets, my office space, workout equipment, and a gaming area.

Living sustainably often means waiting. It’s okay for a house not to be “magazine perfect.” Sure, I’d love for everything to coordinate and function as dreamed right now. It feels weird to have guests sit on our mismatched barstools. But I also don’t want to buy something to have it now only to discard it later. 

To me, buying “just to have” rather than waiting for the right thing is wasteful. Usually you end up with something cheap that doesn’t last through the years.

Instead of rushing to fill every blank space with curated matching sets, I set searches on Facebook Marketplace. Waiting for the right patio table to appear requires true patience and lots of bedtime scrolling. But, I’d rather build our home slowly, piece by piece, than buy everything new just to feel finished. Buying secondhand is an act of love and sustainability. 

Redefine “Local” Every Time You Move

Each time we move, I try to start small: where can we participate, not just consume? What grows here, literally and figuratively, that we can tend to?

In our current neighborhood, peppers were our first connection. A neighbor brought over the abundance of their garden as I didn’t have time to start my own. Later, I handed out bags of pears to neighbors we’d only waved to before. 

Those early steps toward connection—swapping garden produce, discovering the farmer’s market, finding the consignment store with the best kids’ clothes—make a place feel like home.

When you invest in your surroundings, human and otherwise, you create a kind of quiet resilience that sustains us. You begin to realize that “home” was never about the walls at all. It’s about what grows from inside and around them.

A Sustainable Home Is Practice

When I look around our house now, I still see the corners waiting for attention. But I also see continuity. The toaster that’s traveled from house to house. The dresser that’s older than our marriage. The mirror and the photographs my spouse took before we met. Each one holds a thread of this long experiment in making a home.

Sustainability is learning how to live in rhythm with the things we own, the places we inhabit, and the people who share them with us. It’s the patience to wait for the right piece instead of the easy one, the willingness to repair instead of replace, and the care to show up for the small ecosystems we’re part of, even when we might one day move on.

Seven moves later, I see sustainability as the practice of belonging. We curate it each day.