Plant & Sip Blog

Intro: How and When to Water Your Houseplants 

In the last couple years, I have turned into a bit of a plant lady. I bought a tiny haworthia attenuata from a grocery store in 2016 and somehow kept it alive - and it thrived! And then I bought an aloe and that went well. Once I realized I might not be a serial killer of plants anymore, I bought a string of bananas in early 2017. That string of bananas is now as long as I am tall!

And then all hell broke loose and now my house is filling with plants. I've got a few pothos, some snake plants, a huge bromeliad, a dumbcane, umbrella trees, spider plants, calatheas, peperomias, aloes, parlor palms and allllllll the tiny succulents.

Even when it's something as simple as an IKEA bookshelf, building something with your hands is always a satisfying feeling. According to Psychology Today, it also adds value to an object's worth.

The self-satisfaction of successfully completing a DIY project is really all that matters, but Psychology Today's suggestion is that building things yourself makes you value them higher:

The act of building something, putting your own blood and sweat (and if we're being honest, plenty of frustrated swearing) into a physical object, seems to imbue it with additional value above and beyond its inherent quality, which the researchers dub the "IKEA effect." For instance, in one study, participants who built a simple IKEA storage box themselves were willing to pay much more for the box than a group of participants who merely inspected a fully built box. Participants in another study who constructed their own origami frogs and cranes valued them roughly five times as much as another group of participants thought they were worth. The increased value is not just about effort, but about completion, as built-then-disassembled and incomplete projects received no such benefit.