Combining homes is a wonderful opportunity to bring two personalities together

This is a great way to find out how you will work together as a couple

Combining homes isn't always easy and sometimes it's difficult to make sane decisions. Feelings and emotions about our possessions often are more deeply rooted than we realize. It may be impractical to get rid of everything and buy new. The most common practice in combining homes is to keep the best and most important items and start filling in from there.

Combining two households is a wonderful opportunity to bring two styles and two personalities together. This is a great way to find out how you will work together as a couple. Avoid making assumptions about what will stay and what will go. Be diplomatic and don't insist certain things must go. Demands made when combining homes make the other person more possessive and it will be harder to come to an agreement.

In order to understand the process of combining homes and furniture into one household, here are some practical tips to make the process of merging two households run smoothly.

Let's start with one room, the living room, to explain the process of combining homes and keep it simple.

• First carefully consider the major pieces of furniture. Each one of you should pick the piece or pieces that you really can't part with or live without. There should be some valid reason for choosing this; material value, sentiment, or a real attachment because of joy or beauty that it brings to your soul.

• If there is some conflict here, take the time to discuss the reasons for the choice. Explaining the significance of the choice will make it easier for your partner to understand your feelings. Once you talk about certain pieces of furnishings you may agree that you both dislike it and it isn't sentimental after all. On the other hand, the background and feelings attached to a piece may help your partner too see the importance of it and enhance its value in the eyes of your partner.
• If you have duplicates of sofas and chairs, how will they look in the new home look you are trying to create as a couple? If you have two sofas and both are either the wrong style, size, color etc, don't worry. After you go through all these questions and thinking about the new home atmosphere you what to create, you can sell what you no longer want or need and replace the two sofas with a new one that doesn't say yours or mine, but OURS.

Take note of the pieces that were chosen in a notebook along with any other comments you'd like to make

• Do you have a particular decorating style in mind?
• Will these pieces fit into your decorating scheme when combining homes?
• How about your color scheme?
• Will you be able to use these remaining pieces and fit them into your color scheme and decorating style?
• What about size and proportion?
• How do they fit into the space you are trying to create?

Use this process for all the pieces of furniture, rugs, and accessories when working on combining homes. Don't be afraid to discard or sell anything that doesn't have some real meaning to either one of you. On the other hand, respect your spouse's or significant other's feelings, and allow them the freedom of keeping items that are of importance to them without attaching any guilt or ridicule to their choices.

This process may take days or weeks depending on the amount of merging to be accomplished. If you have the time, take time to discuss and reflect on your choices. Not only are you merging two households, you are merging two lives.

The lessons learned in this process of combining homes will give you an idea of how you work together will be invaluable throughout your future