A home maintained imperfectly can still be cared for with steady attention.

Care and tidiness get confused more often than they should. A house with unfinished jobs and a crowded table may be attended to daily by someone doing what they can with the health, money and hours they have. The standard of a magazine is not the standard of a life. What matters is whether attention keeps arriving.

Judge your own place by whether you keep coming back to it rather than by how it would photograph. Pick the one repair that would make daily life easier and leave the cosmetic ones. And be careful about reading somebody else’s rooms as a report on how much they care.