In the homemaking department...

I always thought that I really liked to cook. I even wrote a post about cooking not too long ago. And then I read my friend Erica's latest post. It's about cooking too. And that's when I realized that I don't have a passion for cooking.

I don't mind cooking. I actually often enjoy it. (except for recently, due to not having my own kitchen to work in among other reasons) But even at the best of times, I don't feel that joyous passion when it comes to putting ingredients together to make a dish.

I do, however, find myself having more and more of a passion for putting rooms together. Paint, fabric, furniture, accessories...LOVE IT! I thoroughly enjoyed decorating and redecorating and rearranging our old house. I was rearranging right up until a couple days before we moved. And soon I get a whole new apartment to have fun with! I think that I would even prefer an entire day of cleaning (with accessorizing) over cooking. Cooking happens so that I have something to eat; decorating happens because I love it.

When I was younger, still living at home, my family moved to a new house when I was 11 and I got my own room. I probably switched it around every couple months and tried odd things in the name of decorating. The thing about my creativity back then was that most things didn't look very good. I remember one decorating attempt in particular...I was trying to cover up the water filter that took up valuable real estate in my already small bedroom so I took my curtains off my window and fastened them across the corner of my room, conveniently hiding the tank. I was pretty proud of myself until someone came in and asked if I really thought it looked good. I suddenly became very self conscious about my decorating taste and still find it tough to express my decorating opinions. It usually takes me a couple days to know if I really like something that I've tried with our house. But that's the great thing about decorating...nothing is entirely permanent!

So as we head down south in a matter of weeks, I am looking around me, trying to decide what to take along so that I have something to work with in our apartment. We will have a very small decorating budget (if any) so I'm trying to think of inexpensive things to make our apartment feel like home and look "finished." All I've come up with so far are large pieces of fabric (solid colored inexpensive flat sheets?) and enlarged prints of photos we've taken (affordable thanks to Costco) in solid black frames. I think I'll need to get down there and play around a bit to know better what is needed. But the way it looks now, I'll have plenty of time to be creative and have fun with the look of our place.

So what do you prefer? Cooking? Baking? Decorating? Yardwork? Something else? What's your passion?