How lovely it has been to gradually fill each corner with beauty and intention, though we still have many untouched plans.

By Noelle Mering

Amina Bancroft is a wife and mother of five living in Santa Paula, California. She and her husband, Wes, are Catholic converts. You can find her on Instagram.

It’s been over a year since we moved our family from a quaint little home on the outskirts of town to a larger mid-century home near the city’s center. How lovely it has been to gradually fill each corner with beauty and intention, though we still have many untouched plans.

This little nook invites me to engage with our living room first thing every morning. As I sit here, I don’t necessarily feel productive, or beautiful, or ready for the day. In fact, I’m usually doing something mundane (like drinking coffee), and maybe (probably) the kids are doing something mundane (like watching cartoons). And yet the warmth of this spot has become essential to my daily regimen.

My husband loves to thrift shop. Ever since we were teenagers, our roles would feel “reversed,” as he’d be the one perusing antique stores while his impatient girlfriend tried to figure out what he was looking for. Sometimes it’s not anything specific. Other times it became so integral to our future home together. Our vintage chairs, collection of pottery, kids’ viewfinders, books and bookends all found their way into our current living room.

Some of the books displayed have been key inspirations to our conversion story, while others are little treasures we found along the way. Our shelves tell where we’ve been, from the items we picked up way back on our honeymoon in Iceland, the recent trinkets our kids eagerly collected in Costa Rica this past summer, and that family picture at the Grand Canyon circa the infamous RV road trip of 2017.

These shelves are ever changing and I love to study their imperfections and watch them evolve. There’s a Polaroid of my 4 year old’s nostrils tucked away somewhere next to Mother Mary, and a spatter of disassembled legos and lost marbles in one of the bowls, reminding me how perfectly curated and hilariously disheveled my life is right now.