How to Keep Creating While Your House Is Under Repair
The house is in repairs. Not a poetic kind, the real kind: canvas wrapped in sheets, furniture shifted, dust settling in corners you didn’t know existed. The kind of disruption that makes creativity feel like an afterthought or a luxury.
Yet, creative work continues. Creativity doesn’t wait for perfect circumstances, and it doesn’t disappear when life becomes inconvenient. If anything, it becomes sharper, stripped of ornament, distilled to its essential form.
Some days are draining.
Some days are noisy or crowded or strangely suspended.
Yet the Morning Pages still get written, even if it means sitting at the edge of the bed with a notebook balanced on my knee. The impulse to create finds its way through whatever small opening exists.
Monday 24 November, Europa w saxophone, one of my electro-acoustic pieces, was played on Toneshift radio show. A small bright marker in an otherwise turbulent season.
Unexpectedly, after the broadcast, late November brought a new experience: recording voice for someone else’s upcoming release. It wasn’t planned, my environment wasn't “ready.” But the invitation aligned with a quiet internal yes, and the work itself became grounding.
A reminder that creativity is not tied to the state of a room, but the state of attention.
On Monday 1 December and Monday 8 December 2025 I aired a new edition of my radio show Amazing Songs & Other Delights called Of Mist & Metaphysics. Listen to the Mist & Metaphysics edition.
This is the part of the year where we move through dimming light toward the point where it begins to return. Even in the midst of household chaos, that felt meaningful: a reminder that inner clarity can brighten even when the outer world is messy or transitional.
If you’re in a season where your home life is disassembled or unstable, here’s what I’ve learned:
• You don’t need ideal conditions to create, just a corner of presence.
• Flow can appear on days you least expect it.
• Small rituals matter more when everything else feels scattered.
• Creative work done in imperfect circumstances often carries a raw honesty that polished environments rarely produce.
The repairs will finish eventually. The room will be put back together. The light will shift again. But the creative thread stays unbroken, because it isn’t tied to the state of the house.
It lives in you.
[image: Bianca Vinther - An explosion of artistic creativity]
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