The front yard had been on the list for so long that it had stopped being a list item and had become a fixed condition of the house, one of those things that was always going to be addressed and…
My bathroom had a design identity crisis that had been ongoing for years. The fixtures were contemporary, a chrome faucet, a wall-mounted toilet with a clean rectangular profile, but the tiles were traditional, with a floral pattern that belonged to…
The bathroom vanity had been white since we moved in. Not considered white, the default white of a cabinet that came standard with the house and that had never been actively chosen by anyone currently living in it. I had…
My bathroom had been aesthetically homeless for three years. Not badly furnished, functionally complete, even, but without any coherent design identity that tied its individual elements into a room with a personality. The vanity was from one era, the fixtures…
The paint color that was supposed to solve everything turned out to be the problem. I had chosen pure, bright, confident white for the living room refresh, and the result was a room that looked clean for approximately seventy-two hours…
The morning coffee routine in my kitchen had gradually become its own category of small daily frustration. Not the coffee itself, the coffee was fine, but the specific quality of the counter surface where the coffee was made. The espresso…
The dining room was the room that made the rest of the house feel unfinished. Not because it was poorly furnished, we had a table, we had chairs, we had a rug that had been chosen with care and placed…
The fireplace mantel had become the horizontal surface I was most embarrassed about in my house. Not because it was neglected, I had been actively decorating it for three years. The problem was that every time I decorated it, I…
Movie night in our house had become a negotiation with the living room rather than an experience in it. Someone always had to move the coffee table to get comfortable on the floor. The overhead light that we forgot to…
My bedroom had never been a room I looked forward to entering. It was where I slept, where I charged my phone, where the laundry staged itself before making it to the closet. The walls were the same agreeable nothing-white…
