Love the one you're with

Once upon a time, you were smitten. But now you're bored and annoyed - with your house. Here's how to restore the passion.

(Christopher Silas Neal)

Here's a question. If, while tiptoeing past your preschooler's bedroom, your husband (6-foot-4, size 15 extra-wide feet), awakens the boy, and you get a horrible night's sleep, whom do you hold responsible?

"I totally blame the house," says Vanessa Trien of Brookline, a children's entertainer and music teacher. If it weren't for her cramped home, with its creaky staircase, parking issues, and lack of master bath, the generally cheerful Trien would be better rested, more organized, and smarter about finances. Or so she believes.

The housing slump has claimed many victims: sellers, builders, residents of foreclosure-ridden neighborhoods. But some two years into the slowdown, another group is also suffering - or at least complaining: the stuck. They're would-be buyers like Trien, desperate to leave their too-small, too-suburban, too-whatever homes, but trapped by market forces.

With grim news hitting almost daily - the latest numbers from the Massachusetts Association of Realtors show sales of single-family homes dropped 12.6 percent last year, sales of condos fell 12 percent, and the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston warning the slump could be the longest in 50 years -what's a bored property owner to do? To borrow from Stephen Stills, love the one you're with.

"People need to rekindle their relationships with their homes," says South End interior designer Tony Cappoli, whose credits include turning Manny Ramirez Jr.'s bedroom into a mini Fenway Park. "After a while you've got to find new ways of making it exciting."

But don't feel you have to spend $50,000 on a kitchen renovation to bring back the spark. As any lover knows, it's the thought that counts. Repaint, add a lamp in a dark corner, convert an adult child's bedroom into a gym, buy fresh living room pillows and curtains, put a up a new piece of art. Heck, bring your house flowers. Create a mood.

"One reason people love going into model homes is that everything is done properly," Cappoli says. "There is no clutter, it's perfectly accessorized, there's a candle burning."

In other words, prepare your home as if it were going on the market, and with any luck you'll get seduced all over again. "You have to get to the root of what made you fall in love with that home in the first place," Cappoli says, "and then think about over time what's made it become boring."

The (sort of) good news for those stuck in place is that many problems blamed on domiciles belong not to the homes but the owners.

"If we could find the moving company that could leave your issues behind, that would be great," says Lynne Johnson, a Quincy-based certified professional organizer and president of the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization. Even if antsy homeowners could move into spiffy new digs tomorrow, she adds: "You're going to bring the people who live with you, and sometimes they're the problem."

But it's so much easier on the ego to pin lifestyle disappointments on the condo or the colonial. The fantasy, and it's a common one, goes like this: if I just had more closet space, or the house had a den, or we lived closer to the city, or (insert home's perceived shortcoming here), I'd be better dressed, or able to entertain, or more cultured, or thinner. Indeed, Johnson's clients frequently tell her: "If I could just start over, I'm sure I could keep that kitchen clean," or "I would use all of these cookbooks and things I've purchased for cooking in a new kitchen."

But playing the blame game doesn't help anyone. How can the bored move forward together with their homes? The key, as any relationship counselor will advise, is honesty.

"If you are using your dining room as an office," Johnson said, "don't pretend it's a dining room when you haven't had anyone eat in there for five years. Make it into an office." The same goes for the bedroom chair serving as a clothing repository and the treadmill piled high with books. "It all comes down to function."

And, of course, organization. With home-decorating gurus preaching the religion of orderliness, it's no wonder sales of home-organization products are expected to hit $7.6 billion by 2009, according to the Freedonia Group, a Cleveland-based market research firm.

And yet, despite the promise of a joyful existence held out by those big box anti-clutter emporiums, lack of space may not be the real problem.

"We used to have very large families growing up in little small houses, and now I see very large houses with very small families," Johnson says. "We have this sense we need more space, and I really think it's because our lives are so busy and our brains are so overloaded. We crave internal space, but we're trying to get it externally."

Meanwhile, as Sunday after Sunday passed in Brookline with nary an acceptable real estate listing, Trien and her husband decided to buy a shelving system capable of taming the family's toys, performing supplies and yoga gear.

If only it weren't sitting in pieces in the middle of the living room floor.

"I thought this place was a palace when I moved in," Trien said, somewhat sadly. And now, a few years and one child later? "I'm ready to throw the furniture out the window."