How changing just one room can transform your life (part 2)
Quick announcement: Design a Home You Love enrollment closes on April 25, 2024! If you’re thinking about making changes at home and curious about how I can support you, please don’t wait to check it out. This course only opens once a year!
Last week, we shared part 1 of our Design a Home You Love student transformations. If you missed that post, make sure to read those stories here.
Design a Home You Love is a little different from other interior design resources because the method is grounded in helping you not just create a space you like, but a life you love. This unfolds for different students in different ways. Sometimes it’s deeper relationships with family and friends. Sometimes it’s confidence and personal growth. Sometimes it’s as simple as a greater ability to find joy in everyday moments.
How Changing Just One Room Can Transform Your Life
In these stories, you’ll see how four students created meaningful changes in their lives through the design of their space. Sometimes these rooms look radically different, and sometimes the changes are so subtle you have to look twice to notice them. But even small changes can have surprisingly big effects.
Can a home help you feel more confident?
When my student Amanda started the Design a Home You Love course, she was going through a series of both personal and professional transitions. One of these transitions involved a move from the East Coast back to her hometown in the Midwest. As with many moves, there was the excitement of a kind of “reset” in life, as well as some uncertainty about what daily life would look like. Amanda wanted to use the transformation of her living room to help her feel grounded and supported while her new life was taking shape.
Describing her space before she worked on it, she says, “To be honest, before transforming my space, I never used it/enjoyed it. It always felt cold and uninviting for me.” She noticed that the layout felt constricting, so she focused on opening it up and making it feel warmer through the use of color, textures, and accents.
The effect on her living space has been “life-changing!” She says:
There is a sense of comfort and purpose within the space that I have always been longing for and now have. Walking in and out of my bedroom everyday and looking at this beautiful space gives me so much energy, comfort, stability, and beauty that I always long to experience. Makes me happy everyday, truly!
The space is beautiful, but what resonated most with me about Amanda’s transformation is how it influenced her overall sense of confidence and joy in daily life. She says, “I always used to just hide in my bedroom and now being able to take up more space both physically and emotionally has impacted my life greatly. Now I even host friends over to also enjoy the space with me and add some beauty within our gatherings.”
For Amanda, “taking up space” means having the confidence to face fears, take risks, and “evolve and change into the person we are meant to grow into.” I love the idea that a home can be a place to practice this kind of confidence and a springboard for bringing this self-assurance with us out into the world.
Can your home help you achieve a goal?
When she and her husband moved, Vidhi ended up with an empty foyer she never used and didn’t know what to do with. Friends mentioned a formal dining room, but she knew that wasn’t something her family needed. Instead, the coursework pointed her towards something that felt more joyful — more her. And so began the design of her dream library.
Instead of getting bogged down in Pinterest, Vidhi took a cue from the Design a Home You Love program’s focus on starting with a feeling. An avid reader, she envisioned “a place to escape into the fantasies talented authors imagined for me, with one of my purring cats by my side as the only connection to my reality.” This led her to find inspiration directly in her passion for reading. She looked to the libraries of the wealth protagonists she’d read about in historical fiction and fantasy novels. “I wanted to evoke a similar vibe as one of those libraries, but modernized,” she says.
What’s powerful about this approach is that it prompts you to think first about what you really desire, and then let the space flow from that. The vision becomes so clear and compelling that you’re less likely to get hung up on details like what color the chair should be or how big a rug to buy.
Like Amanda’s living room, Vidhi’s space has had a powerful effect on her daily life. In particular, it has helped her achieve her goal of reading more books. She says:
I never dreamed I would have a library in my home. On days I don’t have the time to spend in it, I catch myself looking at it longingly. It has become a motivating way for me to stick to my goal of reading. Having this library is a constant reminder of my favorite hobby, and it encourages me to continue to read guilt-free because now there is the added benefit of using the space I designed. It has, unsurprisingly, become one of my favorite spaces in the house.
Vidhi has since used the course methodology to transform another room in her home: her home office. She says this home office encourages her to get away from her desk and work in different positions to break up the routine on long days working from home. She also managed to make the space functional as a guest room, so it serves multiple functions.
For Vidhi, the process of reflection she went through to create these rooms has been its own reward. She writes:
More than anything, I appreciate how the course encourages you to look within, to find what truly sparks joy for you, and to bring it out in your home. I love my room because it is authentically me, not a trend. I personally feel like I can go deeper to unravel myself even more; I look forward to revisiting the course and exercises again in the near future.
Could your home bring your family closer?
Marianne began the Design a Home You Love course with a wish. Having lived in apartments for most of her life, she now had a dining room, and it made her dream of hosting friends and family for long meals and game nights.
Yet the dining room she had left some things to be desired, and this could be seen in the way her family was using the space.
As soon as we were done eating, we would get up and/or every time we had a chance, we would eat in the living room instead. There was no decor yet and I was feeling a little paralyzed as to how to design this space that was so central to our home. The room felt impersonal, lifeless, boring, cold and repressed.
Marianne knew she wanted a rounder table to bring more intimacy and playfulness to the space. She scored a deal on Marketplace and her transformation started to take shape. A more welcoming light fixture and a vintage suzani found on Etsy (that she mounted herself in her spare time) helped to bring warmth and energy to the room.
Even with these small changes, the effect in Marianne’s home has been radical. She writes:
Our dining room has now seen plenty of game nights and long meals happen. We spend more time at the table, even on week nights, after we’re finished eating. In the summer, when or yard is full of flowers, I bring in little bouquets to the table. Every time we enter our house, we see this space that feels inviting and energizing and it sparks a little joy. I still marvel at how little we did and how much of an impact it made.
Marianne’s story is a reminder that you don’t need to make big or expensive changes to shift a space in a way that will make your life better. Each one of those family dinners, each one of those game nights, is a memory that will stay with her family for years to come.
She notes that her dining room is still a work in progress. But, she says, “I just feel like now, it is a comfortable room we like to spend time in and there is nothing really bugging us anymore. Taking our time to make our space our own is important to us so there is no rush.”
Marianne says she feels more confident taking her time because she now has more clarity about what she wants for her home. She says:
The biggest gain I had from the course was feeling more confident in my choices and what I’m (really!) attracted to. When I buy something for our home, I do it with much more intention and vision than I did before. I feel safer investing in expensive pieces when I need to because I have a better idea of what feels good to us and where we’re headed with the design of our space.
Can your home help you live in the present?
If you’d asked her a year ago, my student Maria would’ve told you she hated her home.
It felt dark and dingy, even in the daytime. “I always neglected it,” she says, “waiting for a future day when I could move to the house of my dreams.” Rooms sat empty or piled with boxes, and she avoided having anyone over.
This is a story I’ve heard a lot. Maybe it’s your story too.
I call it the all-or-nothing trap. It’s a little voice that tells you that unless you have a ton of time, money, and a perfect house, there’s no point in trying to make your home feel better.
When we succumb to this mentality, what we’re really doing is postponing joy. We’re putting our present life on hold while we wait for some uncertain happiness in the future.
One thing I’m really passionate about is the idea that we can have big dreams and big goals yet still find joy in our very imperfect present. This is what Maria realized as she started taking the Design a Home You Love course. She says:
While taking Design a Home You Love a new thought came into my mind, of small areas of joy, possible in this house today. Step after step that the room of my dreams showed up here, right now. After years of having hated this house… and thinking that I had to wait to have a new house to start enjoying being at home I find myself with a room that has light (!), and all the things I love at sight without being overwhelming.
The room Maria thought was hopelessly dark is actually full of light. Instead of avoiding it, she gravitates towards it. And more importantly, this space has helped her focus on enjoying her life right now. Her once-hated home is now the gathering place for her friends, who spend what Maria calls “teenage afternoons in our 50’s” together.
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Reminder: Design a Home You Love enrollment closes soon! This week is the last chance to join our flagship design course until we reopen in 2025. Get all the details and sign up here.
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