The Secret to Finding Your Style and Feeling More at Home Where You Live

by Melissa @ The Inspired Room | Mar 16, 2021 | Authentic Living, Decorating Inspiration, Finding your style, Style Tips

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What’s your decorating style? Do you feel at home where you live? If you ever feel conflicted about your style or the next decisions to make in making your house your home, you’re not alone! Maybe you’re feeling stuck, or your current style isn’t working for you. Perhaps you’re living in a home that wasn’t custom designed for you or even close to your style to begin with. Maybe you’re wrestling with how to update a room (or the whole house!). It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all of the options, especially with the abundance of ideas and inspiration online!

So how can you find your style when there are so many directions you could go? What if you feel limited by the current style of your home or your budget?

Here’s the secret: finding your authentic style takes time. You’ll find it with patience and experimentation.

But you don’t have to have a perfectly designed home to love where you live, so not to worry! You can find ways to feel more at home with what you have right now and as you consider the plans for what you want to do next.

Creating a home you love takes time. I don’t think most of us can make the best decisions until we’ve had a chance to get to know the home we live in. So if you just moved in, or are new to decorating your home, you’ll need to give yourself time to observe the quirks and personality of your home. When you know your home better, you can more confidently play up what you’ve learned to love about it and figure out how to affordably minimize, downplay or fix what you don’t.

My advice? I think most of us are likely to make better and more long-lasting decisions after we’ve lived in a home for at least four seasons. That might seem like a long wait, but unless your home is not livable right now and needs to be remodeled immediately, it’s worth it to give it time.

It takes quite awhile to gather and consider style updates or remodeling ideas that will improve your home, without investing more than you want to. If you have money to burn you might more easily want to throw caution to the wind and do everything your heart desires immediately. Some mistakes are not permanent or are fixable later if you have the budget! But if you want to make the wisest and most cost-effective choices the first time, particularly with a remodel or other big ticket purchases, you need time to observe your home in all different seasonal light and experience what it feels like to live there in all types of weather.

In time you’ll often decide that some features you originally thought needed to be changed might actually be just fine as they are or will be with a few tweaks (or that they are not a priority after all!). The decisions you might have made earlier on are often different than you’d make now. Once you learn how you live in the house and what it feels like in every season, you can arrange your home and decorate with more confidence, too.

With enough time to collect appropriate ideas for your home, you can narrow down the options that not only consistently speak to you, but also make the most sense for your budget, lifestyle and the unique needs of your house.

It’s easy to lose our focus when we are in a hurry. Impulse decisions might bring some immediate or even long-term joy, but it’s a wonderful feeling when you really know your home so you can be more confident in what you want to do.

Your style is not just the one you like the most online, but it’s what makes you feel the most at home where you actually live. That’s how you’ll know you’ve found your authentic style.

When I’m struggling with my own style, it can be helpful to collect inspiration photos of rooms or features that I really love, such as the images I share in my posts (these photos in my post today are from one of my favorite shops for furnishings and style inspiration for my home, Serena & Lily. I’ve written about it before in this post).

But I don’t want to rush permanent or expensive decisions or make a lot of changes based on an inspiration photo until I’m certain that look or item will feel right in my own home. I like to take a bit of inspiration from dozens of rooms and ideas I’ve collected over time so my style won’t be an exact replica of anyone else’s style.

It can be a slow process to figure it all out, but it’s worth it to me to be as authentic and comfortable in my home as possible.

Sometimes to move forward you just need to make ONE design decision you know you feel good about. That decision will lead to the next. We remodeled our kitchen four years ago and the decisions we made during that project continue to inspire me to make our little house all she can be :) I’ve often said the old house I live in was ready for a new spring in her step. She may have been born in the 1950s but she doesn’t have to stay there.

You don’t have to stay stuck with what you have! I’m so glad I didn’t let myself be discouraged or swayed early on by voices that told me this house had to stay in a certain era or style. I didn’t want to feel limited in what I could or could not do to make it my own. It’s certainly helpful to ask for opinions from trusted sources when you’re in doubt (or if you’re dealing with an historic home that needs to be preserved), but often creating a home you’ll truly love means you have to be brave enough to listen to your own voice so you can design a home that will feel right to you. After all, it’s your home and you’ll be the one living there!

Lastly, it’s OK to make mistakes along the way. Rarely is a decorating mistake fatal! In fact, in some cases what might appear to be a “mistake” can actually give your home and style more character and personality. Other times it confirms for you what your style ISN’T. But even if it is a big mistake you need to correct, just learn from it and move on.

You’ll never feel truly at home with your style until you get to know yourself and your home better. That process takes time, but it is all a part of the journey to making a house truly feel like home.

Speaking of Serena & Lily, scroll down for inspiration, sources and ideas for this fresh breezy look!