My House

Welcome to my new home!

We just bought this house in October of last year. I am slowly (picture a snail) transforming it to more my style, which I describe as “northwest coastal style” (or to be honest my style is probably eclectic northwest coastal farmhouse cottage because I am kind of indecisive and like to have options. Don’t judge).

We live in the NW, our home is a craftsman style and we live in the Puget Sound area about an hour from Seattle. From my front porch we can see a “peek-a-boo” view of a lake. While I don’t exactly live by the sea, I like to dream!

But more than focusing on my decorating style and how amazing I might be able to make my home LOOK with lots of time staging or buying lots of stuff in a hurry for show, I like to focus more on my LIFE and let my style evolve as I experience the world around me.

I learned many years ago that I could spend too much time rushing around perfecting how a room looked, and miss out on savoring the process (and precious other things in life.)

Decorating my home is something I love, but I am always mindful of where my priorities are and the distinction between having a lovely home that works for who we are as a family and a perfect home designed for a magazine cover.

I don’t spend lots of time doing and redoing my rooms, just for the sake of reaching design perfection. For me it has to be a labor of love, not an obsession. That is why I pace myself. I want my home to be truly inspired by our life, and that authenticity tends to come with time, layer by layer.

I have an ever present struggle to protect myself against my former self-proclaimed disease, magazine cover-itis, which basically used to tempt me to want my home to look like a magazine cover. If it didn’t measure up to the cover, I was not satisfied. And the worst of it was, I didn’t have the time necessary nor the money to achieve what I imagined in my mind, so it was frustrating for me to settle for what was really appropriate for me.

But now, I’m content with what I have. I love to live in the moment.

I’m always on the lookout for doable ideas and easy ways to make a home beautiful to those who live there, I want it to feel beautiful from the inside out. I love having things in my home that have meaning and history so that my home radiates our love of life and all the positive memories we have.

A want a home that is good for our souls, not just for the camera.

My Old House

Since we just moved recently, you might be interested to see our last house. It was an old English Tudor. And it was a real wreck when we moved in, but we came in (naively!) and set out to restore it! It was a crazy project — I get tired just thinking about all we had to do to make that house livable. We never really finished all we intended to do there before we had to move for a new job, but click here for the tale of that home…