Here are four ways you can begin to design a home you love!

1. Define your design standards.

Rather than feeling the pressure or frustration of high or unrealistic standards, perfectionism or comparison, set your own design standards!

Give yourself a reasonable and personal design standard to live up to! Make a list of what matters to you and how you could feel more content in the ways you decorate. Hang it on your mirror so when you start to feel like you aren’t measuring up to your own expectations, or if you aren’t keeping up with someone else’s, you can refresh your memory on what YOUR design standards are.

2. Set seasonal priorities.

If you feel like you never have enough time to work on your home, or feel overwhelmed by options, home projects or design decisions, make a plan. Rather than scrolling or shopping aimlessly, it helps me so much to make a list of priorities that keep me grounded and focused on what is important to me.

A wonderful way to get organized is to set up a rhythm of priorities that will help you focus.

I share my 5 priorities, seasonal home rhythms and home notebook system in a foundational course called How to Welcome a New Season to Your Home, which I offer in HomeBody Gathering Place.

You can use this simple practice of a Seasonal Home Rhythm and notebook system as a planning tool or inspiration to think through your own plans and home priorities. Refer to it before you commit to home improvement projects or make decisions. You can also use this practice to make room for more joy and “balance” in each season.

It’s important to take into consideration what is ahead for your family, what’s happening currently in your home or personal life. This home rhythm will help you find more clarity on where you want to invest time or money at home so you can make the most of what you have.

3. Name your authentic style.

Your style should be unique to you. It doesn’t have to have a name anyone else would recognize! Instead of basing decorating decisions or how you feel about your home on whether or not it reflects a well-known or current design style, make up your own!

How could you describe or define your style? Don’t let arbitrary magazine headlines, or the latest trends, or another designer’s personal opinion cause you to be frustrated or unhappy with your home.

Make up your own style description!

Style is in the personal little details of what makes us who we are, it isn’t necessarily going to be found in the quiz that we take online or defined by the rooms we love the most on Instagram.

I offer a style course and a Room Recipe decorating course along with weekly teaching to help walk members of HomeBody Gathering Place through this personal process. You’ll learn to define and embrace your unique style as well as ways to express it creatively and personally in your home.

4. Tell a personal and meaningful story at home.

Creating a home you love is about learning to tell a meaningful story. I like to make the experience fun — decorating doesn’t have to be so serious or mysterious!

While you can certainly google a list of decorating rules to follow, and find lots of recommendations of things to buy and principles to design a cookie cutter home, I love to help people learn how design a home in a more personal and meaningful way.

To create a home we love, we have to make the process meaningful and rewarding, too. A home takes time. If we don’t enjoy the experience, or we don’t know how to make decisions that will make our home a reflection of our family, we’ll find ourselves writing the wrong story into the walls of our home.

When we invest ourselves and weave our personal stories into the experience of home-creating, we build connections to our home that will make us love it and our lives more.

Would you like to learn more about embracing your style, decorating and creating a home you love?

I’d love to help you! I offer a decorating course called Room Recipe in my community HomeBody Gathering Place. You’ll learn the four ingredients I use to design any room, whether it’s simply rearranging what I have or redesigning an entire room!

Whether you’re new to decorating or have enjoyed it for a long time, Room Recipe will inspire you to look at your rooms and the things you decorate with in a new way.

We use our four simple ingredients as a fun framework to be able to teach specific principles and share how to’s such as what to do with things you have, decorating formulas, how to style accessories, and ways we can evolve our home and decorating style over time.

Each week in the HGP I will show you ways these ingredients help us create a home we truly love (and even how I applied them to my own spaces) Within the course we also offer Decorating Cheat Sheets so you can easily find our helpful design principles, and you can also can ask questions or get help in the community.

These are just a few of the ways to create a home I love, as well as some of the courses and resources I offer for those who want to be more intentional in their homes, too. I hope this sparked some ideas for you!

Our HomeBody Gathering Place doors are open to new members for just a few more days, so if you’re thinking about it, don’t wait! All of my courses are available in the membership so you can get started immediately! For a limited time it’s just $12 monthly or $110 a year for all access to the courses, printables and weekly teaching, so it’s a worthwhile investment in yourself and your home!