Balancing beauty and function with a baby in tow | Home With Tess

While not everything you learn in school stays with you, some lessons have a way of living rent-free in your head. One lesson I’ll never forget comes courtesy of my visual communication design professor, who once described design as the intersection of beauty and function.

I have since viewed all types of design that way, including interior. Because let’s face it: If something you change in your home for the sake of appearance suddenly creates a problem, or vice versa — if you address a problem but create an eyesore in its place — those design choices can detract from your experience actually living in the home.

Since my 16-month-old son, Henry, started walking, the pursuit of beauty and function has never been more challenging. Now that he is fully mobile, it’s game on. He can destroy a room in five minutes flat. He can hurt himself on nearly any object imaginable (or even on things you wouldn’t imagine), so baby-proofing measures have taken full effect. He can, and does, spend most of his time picking up random objects and transporting them to different rooms, often choosing rather important items (glasses, watches, etc.) and taking them to rather undesirable places (i.e. the toilet).

Simply put, for a vast majority of the time, my house is pure visual chaos.

This is, of course, what life is naturally like with young kids. Making sure my son has space to play and make messes and be a child is much more important to me than preserving aesthetics. Plus, every little toy and baby-proofed door handle and watch in the toilet is a reminder of his presence, and for that, I am grateful.

Still, I can’t help wanting to maintain the way my home looked before a baby as much as possible while still making it a warm, accommodating, safe space for said baby — a task that has required some creativity and compromise.

One area I’ve found success in is keeping his toys relatively confined. Since Henry is the first grandchild of both our families, our house is now practically overflowing with multicolored plastic, but I’ve tried to make sure that at the end of the day, his toys have a designated place that is out of sight. Since we have very limited built-in storage in our house, I’ve kept the toy avalanche at bay with the help of several toy baskets in his room. In our living room, we have a shelving unit with hidden storage that is fully dedicated to his toys, as well as a large, covered wicker trunk that I thrifted. Being able to haphazardly toss toys in there at the end of a long day has been a lifesaver, and seeing the floor clean — if only for five minutes — feels like a peaceful exhale.

Other adjustments have required more experimentation. There are infinite baby-proofing items online, but I didn’t want to blindly purchase them, so I’ve kept a close eye on Henry as he toddles around the house to identify what safety measures are essential.

This is an ongoing process, but as soon as he started walking, doors became an obvious first target. Opening doors of all kinds is his new favorite hobby.

Stick-on door baby locks and straps to keep cabinets closed are the most obvious choices, but I was hesitant the adhesive would peel the paint off our woodwork when we removed the locks (and if you’ve read my past columns, you know that painting my cabinets was a huge undertaking that I’d like to avoid doing ever again). Still, I ordered a couple to try on our doors.

I cannot yet speak to the paint peeling dilemma, but I’m glad I only ordered a few of the locks. My husband has, without thinking, locked the door from the outside before entering the bathroom, unintentionally locking himself in there while I wasn’t home. As it turns out, the locks are adult-proof, too.

Thankfully, I was only a few minutes away, but the locks have gone relatively unused since then.

Instead, we have started locking doors from the inside of the room and keeping a tiny screwdriver handy to unlock them from the outside as needed. As for the cabinets, I have made sure to remove any items I don’t want him to access, so he is free to play in them as he’d like.

This constant battle between beauty and function is likely something I’ll be grappling with as long as I have young children, and function tends to have the upper hand. This is just one of the many compromises parents make, and in the grand scheme of things, it’s a small one.

But in the rare instances when I can hold onto and protect beauty, I try to seize the opportunity. These brief moments make me feel like I'm in control of the chaos, if only for a moment.

Email your questions to Theresa “Tess” Bennett at homewithtess@gmail.com.

Home With Tess: Aw, nuts: Unearthed plants and peanut shells make for frustrated gardener

Home With Tess: Mission complete: Is building your own patio worth it?

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Balancing beauty and function with a baby requires creative thinking