One of the skills I wish I had was the ability to pull a room together with a minimal number of second-guesses! My mother was a successful interior designer with her own firm and my grandmother was an accomplished decorator who also owned a renowned antique store in our town. It’s special to have that legacy… but it would be more special if some of their talent and decision-making ability had rubbed off on me!

Something I’ve found very interesting over the years as my husband and I combine our possessions is just that—combining our possessions. What means the most to us? How do we meld two different aesthetic preferences together? How do we make a room livable for us, practical for a preschooler, and, above all, comfortable? It’s been a process, and one that takes time. But it’s taken time in the best possible way.

I watch people online hire decorators and designers and, in record-breaking time, watch them debut their new homes. And then I watch them do it all over again a few years later. Either they’re choosing to decorate their homes to trend, or they’re not understanding how they live and utilize their space, or they’re not thinking about what they really want instead of what’s popular, or so on. It’s interesting to watch, and certainly it’s “content,” but it is frankly off-putting. I am very much of the belief that you should do a major decoration once, and simply update smaller things as your lifestyle changes. You can always cycle in new/old furniture, have furniture reupholstered, repaint, and so on. But big purchases—window treatments, rugs, and furniture itself—are things I plan on investing in once.

Because I have a serious inability to make up my mind when it comes to interiors, I’ve been trying to take things one room at a time, beginning with the living room. The fact that we didn’t have guests during the pandemic made it more difficult to see how we’d use the room for playdates, coffees, or entertaining friends. We did take care of a few major things in 2021—refinishing the floors, replastering the ceiling, and repainting the walls.

We also had a rug made for us towards the middle of 2022 and, while it took about three months, the wait was worth it! We were able to get in-progress photos of the process, watching the rug come together. We were able to order the colorways and size that we wanted, and we could support artisans in this fascinating and demanding craft. Even if we eventually decide to change the color of the living room in the future, we’ll be able to use the rug in different rooms of the house, something we considered when we ordered the rug.

Another tough decision to make was artwork. My husband had a large collection of artwork, some of which we hung and some of which is in storage. But we really struggled with choosing something for above the fireplace. As both the rug and the walls are pale and neutral colors, we wanted to go with something a little bolder. My husband spent a great deal of time researching up-and-coming artists, finding a number of options that we both liked before we decided on the right painting. I don’t want to say that we chose the painting based on our room, because I don’t think art should be chosen simply to fit a room. (Besides, with a room with a neutral palette, there were no real guidelines we had other than size.) We both loved the painting we chose and felt it spoke to us, so we bought it!

For furniture, we added a second side table to the room, one I’d bought my husband for a birthday several years earlier. (You can see the table here.) We also shifted our room to make space for our current lifestyle by altering the china cabinet. We removed the hutch on top of the cabinet to prevent our preschooler from scaling the cabinet like Mount Everest (all too likely in that treacherous I-must-climb-everything phase!) and changed it into a games and arts-and-crafts cabinet. We use the living room the most out of any room in the house, and it was important to us to both allow for a child-friendly space as well as storage to keep things out of view when we have visitors.

While this is still a work in progress, it has been a fun but humbling experience to undertake! I found it much easier to decorate our city apartment, primarily because that did not have the additional challenge of ensuring child-friendly spaces in the house, and also because that was always a more temporary arrangement as we decided where we would live. That being said, I’m having much more fun with this—I just hope that I’m up for the challenge!

How do you decorate your home? Do you decorate on your own or with professional advice? Which room did you work on first? Let me know in the comments below!