011: Building your dream home: 6 steps to discovering your style, choosing aesthetics, and envisioning your design to create a house you love
Listen On:
Show Notes
Ready for a home remodel, renovation, or building new? Thinking of redecorating? There are so many decisions to make when it comes to designing your dream home. In this episode I'll help you discover your unique style and envision the perfect design for your dream home through six essential steps. Explore ideas, visit showrooms, and gather samples of wood, countertops, paint, and fabrics to uncover your personal aesthetic. Dive into setting goals for your space, selecting materials, and determining your decor priorities. Learn how to tie everything together for a cohesive look that reflects your vision and creates a home you'll love.
Links Mentioned:
· Episode 10: How to Envision Your Decision
· Episode 2: When your heart and head disagree on a decision
· Pinterest (follow me @ www.Pinterest.com/anchoreddecisions)
· Houzz.com
· Lindsay Dean of Frills & Drills www.instagram.com/frills_and_drills
· My Instagram: www.instagram.com/anchoreddecisions
· Show notes: www.anchoreddecisions.com/11
Connect with me on social media:
www.instagram.com/anchoreddecisions
www.facebook.com/anchoreddecisions
Check out my website and decision guide shop:
www.anchoreddecisions.com
www.anchoreddecisions.com/shop
*Note: Some links might be affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission from the referral purchase at no extra expense to you. I only promote items I trust and believe in. Clicking these links helps support my show.
Transcript
All right, you guys, I have an exciting and fun episode for you today. And an even more exciting announcement about something in my personal life. I felt like after last week's episode on how to envision your decisions, I couldn't leave you hanging without diving into how to envision aesthetic decisions such as for building a house, remodeling, decorating, all that goes into your style in your home. Because I know I have a friend who's building a house right now. I have one who has been starting to redecorate her house. And I myself have a big announcement of what we are doing to our house. So all of these are big deals and big things that are typically a lot of it, permanent decisions. Things that you're not going to change for a very long time, without a huge expense. So you want to get it right. You want to make sure it's what you like and that everything flows well together. So today we'll be diving into how to make these aesthetic decisions and including some ways to envision your project and see it all together.
Because I think that's a huge part of an aesthetic decision like this. You have to be able to visualize what it's going to look like before you put it in your space. And that will give you the best results, make you the happiest with your design choices. So stay tuned as we dive into this.
Intro: Welcome to the Anchored Decisions Show. I'm your host, Lauren Black, the world's biggest overthinker turned decision coach, all by the grace of God. Now I'm on a mission to help you make easier decisions, discover God's will, and live with purpose. Tune in weekly to hear real life decision stories, expert insights, and faith based strategies to help you navigate your decisions with confidence. So ditch your pros and cons list and learn to make better decisions without asking your mom or losing another night of sleep. Let's go.
Alright, you guys, and now for my big announcement. If you listened to episode two, you will know that my house has a lot of very outdated features. And we liked the location of the house. We liked the bones of the house when we were looking at it. And we weren't afraid of some projects. Now, did I know that it was going to take over 11 years before we got to some of these projects? No. I was a little naive at the time. My husband's more of the finance guy, so he probably knew and understood exactly what would go into it.
And we take the stance of wanting to pay cash for most of our projects so we don't have to pay interest on things, which in the long run, if we looking back, we probably could have taken a loan out 11 years ago to pay for some of these projects, and since prices were so much cheaper back then, even if we paid interest on that loan, we probably still would benefit and make out better than what we would do today. Yet, I am very glad that 25 year old me was not the one making the design choices because things like the flooring in our bedrooms that I did pick out back then — we wanted to get rid of the carpet, we put in some engineered hardwoods — I don't like these hardwoods anymore.
They were a little bit of a budget stretch for us then, but they're much cheaper of floors than what I would pick out nowadays . And they're already dented and scratched. And also not the style that I would pick out for myself today. So we are tearing up the floors that we put in 11 years ago to put in new floors throughout the house. So, hopefully I'll still like these floors in 11 years, but I think my style has matured over the years and I think I've really tuned into a style longterm. Things that have been on my Pinterest board for inspiration for years and years that I still like. So I think I'm going to be in a good spot. But if you haven't picked up on it by now, I don't think I stated exactly what we're doing. We are going to start remodeling our house, a lot of the projects that we've been wanting to tackle. We have an investment property that is closing May 1st, so we are going to use those funds plus whatever else we've saved to invest in these projects. So we will be redoing the floors throughout the whole entire house. Which if you remember from my other episode includes the orange tiles in the main common areas of the house.
And I am so excited to get rid of those. That's also in the bathrooms, they have the same tile throughout. We are also going to be redoing our kitchen. And a little bit of the dining space, just kind of adding a coffee bar and some bench seating to the window area in our dining space. And we are also going to be eventually redoing the bathrooms.
We're not sure if we'll be tackling those at the same time, just because there's so many projects going on. And very likely my husband, Josh, will be the one to redo the bathrooms since they're not quite as big of a project as the kitchen. So those might have to wait a little bit. But certain things like flooring, if we go with a vinyl flooring, you can put that in the bathrooms. So in that case, we would have to tear out the vanities that are there and put in our final vanities before we lay the flooring. So we might end up doing the bathrooms right now as well. Either way we did just get new, fresh white toilets to replace some of the peach toilets that we had, and that feels so nice. It's been a long time coming.
We probably should have just bought new toilets from the start instead of just new toilet seats, which by the way, you can't find peach toilet seats very easily these days. So we had peach toilets with white toilet seats for about 11 years. Not so pretty.
So you can probably imagine how enthusiastic and excited I am about these projects.
And to finally get some of the things done that I've been wanting to do in our house and get my dream house created and made. And also means that we are spending a ton of time right now meeting with contractors and design specialists picking out all of our products. There are so many decisions that come with redoing your kitchen completely from scratch and redoing so many things in your house. Everything from which color flooring to which material of flooring and how you're going to install the flooring. Then in the cabinets, what type of cabinet, whether it's the frameless cabinet, a framed cabinet or an inset cabinet, if you don't know what I'm talking about, that's probably a good thing. Don't need to worry about it. And then also just what hardware, where are you placing things within the kitchen? How tall should you make the cabinets and how deep? Are you removing walls? Are we putting up beams in order to open up the space more like there are so many things that need to be discussed and so many decisions.
I'll be sharing a lot of that over on Instagram. So make sure you go follow me @anchoreddecisions if you want to see some of my design choices, some of the progress. I mean, we're still probably a few months out from actually starting. A, because we need the money to come in from this investment house that is selling and then B, because we need to make sure we have everything set. And some of these cabinet places take weeks to get the cabinets in, and we don't want to tear out the floors and the kitchen before the cabinets are ready because then we'll be living without a kitchen. And with our flooring, the flooring we want to do, we have to get everything out of our house. Like literally everything off the floors. That's going to be a huge project, which means we also now have decisions to make about what to keep and what to purge. I am clearing out closets. I am getting rid of things and that's going to feel really good, especially when we move everything back in and I can keep it all organized.
This does mean that my business will be put on the back burner a little bit. So I might drop the podcast down to every other week, starting in the summer when I lose my consistent childcare.
But I should really get to the episode now that we're 10 minutes in, sorry about that. I usually like to cut straight to the content, but I had to give you some of the backstory of where I'm coming from with this episode. And just wanted to share my exciting news with you. So, let's dive into the steps you can take to envision the aesthetics for your home and how you can make decisions there.
Step 1: Gather Ideas
Step number one is to just start by gathering ideas. Discover your personal style, your preferences. Go on Pinterest, go and Houzz. You can create accounts on both of those where you can pin things to boards. You can even within both of them create organization within the boards. So you can have a dream home board on Pinterest with a kitchen renovation, and then you could even break it down to like cabinet style, hardware, whatever you want.
I'm not going that crazy, but you can, if you want. And that will help you stay organized and give you a big picture of what you like. So just start with pinning anything that catches your eyes, or if you are out and about at Home Depot or at a show room at a friend's house, take pictures of what you like and start adding those to your boards. Or if you don't want to use Pinterest or Houzz, have a folder on your computer or folder in your photos app on your phone, that you can store all of your inspiration.
Just something that they don't have to be cohesive at this point. You just want to start seeing what do I like? Start thinking about it. Yesterday we were at the kitchen design center and we had to start picking out the countertop. And that's one thing I haven't really started to look at countertops and notice, what do I like? What do I not like? So make sure that you're starting to notice those things and starting to pin what you like in order to start making an inspiration board and start picking a direction.
Step 2: Determine Your Home Goals
So step number two is to decide your goals and your priorities. So these goals for your space or goals for your design could be things like durability, sustainability, style, trendiness, harmony, function, ease of maintenance and cleaning. So for our floors, I thought originally that my number one priority was the durability of the floor. Because I have two crazy boys that I know are going to be dropping knives on the floor, throwing toys, racing their cars up and down the hallway. I really thought durability was my number one, because that is important. But then I realized if durability was my number one, I'd be going with tile. But I A don't like the maintenance of keeping up with grout. I have tile throughout right now. And I don't like it. I don't like dealing with grout. And then also with tile, I just feel like it takes a little bit of the warmth, away of the space. And I do love the look of wood, like real wood.
So I realized after thinking about it more, that's the style and the color were my number one. My parents are renovating their house and they're putting in this really beautiful engineered hardwood in their floors. So we got the samples from them. It's actually really great price. And we also got some samples from that same company of the same wood and just different finishes. I really like a gray undertone for my floor, since that goes with the aesthetic I want for the rest of my house and a lot of the design choices that are already in our house, as well as what I'm envisioning for our kitchen. So for me, that color of the gray undertone is huge for my husband.
The style of having some of the knots show, some of the character of the wood, some of the grain patterns. He wants those to show through. Whereas my parents wood, that all shows through, but to me it's almost a little too yellow, but yet the gray ones that I like, the grain patterns and the knots are a little more washed out because of this kind of white washing stain that they put on top of it.
So we are needing to compromise there, but style and color are definitely our number one. Then number two is the material. Actually come to think of it material is probably our number one. Because if it was just style and color, we probably would've gone with vinyl or laminate because those come in a lot of different styles that you don't have to worry about the stain washing away the character. So materials are number one, we are going with an engineered hardwood. We are going with an engineered hardwood and that's our number one . Then the style and color of the wood is our number two. So my bad with that one. And the number three for me is the maintenance of it. So definitely want something that is easy to clean, easy to maintain. And then number four would be durability. We want something that's going to last. We want something that's going to withstand the kids. And that's why with the hardwoods, the one we're getting, you can refinish your floors three or four times. And they say most people never need to do it that many times, but you could also change the color if you don't like it down the line. Whereas if you put in a tile or a vinyl or laminate, it's going to be a big deal if you want to change the color on that. So that is how we've chosen our floors. Those were our goals.
Now you could think of the goals for the space itself. So your kitchen and dining area — for me, I want to get people out of my kitchen. It's a small enclosed space. We do not have an open floor plan, the ovens right there, the stove. So when people are over, we're entertaining and we've got the oven on, it gets hot in there because everybody's crowded in around the island because that's where the food is. And it gets loud. So I need a way to make my dining space, which is actually bigger than my kitchen, to be the entertaining space. I want to move people from the kitchen to the dining. And therefore I'm setting up a coffee bar where all the drinks will go and extending the peninsula into the dining area a little bit, and that's where all the food will go. So people will flock there. And then adding some bench seating in the corner with some pillows, real comfy spot. With maybe a coffee table or a small table for people to lounge and chill and hang out and also adding a TV to the dining room. Which you will be able to see from the kitchen. Because currently with that closed off floor plan, if you're in the kitchen or dining room, you don't get to see the TV. So if we're having people over for a football game, but they want the snacks, they have to leave the TV area to get the snacks. So now they can have their snacks and they can have the TV with the game on. So I think it's going to be great for achieving the goals that I want to achieve.
If you look at my younger son's room, the goal for that room was that it needed to be really stylish because it has two barn doors that open up that we keep open during the day that is off the main area of the house. So everybody coming into the house can see into his room. So yes, we could just close the barn doors, but his room is my favorite in the house right now. It's very stylish. We've got a cool wall treatment on the one wall. A really pretty chandelier in the corner over a La-Z-Boy chair. It's just cozy. It's welcoming. We keep it clean so that it can be this stylish space off the main house. And then Austin's room also needs to double as a guest room for us. So that determined what type of bed to put in. And we have a trundle bed. That's a twin, but you can pull the twin out from under it and pop it up to be a king.
So, what are your goals for your space? What are your goals for your actual materials? Your goals for your changes and for your decor. Think through all of that and your priorities, and that will help you start to make decisions. Because sometimes you don't even know where to start. But now you have a good starting point.
Step 3: Choose a Pillar Feature
So this leads into step number three, which is to choose a pillar feature. What is a must have item, material, color, something, that you can base all of your decisions around. So maybe this is a piece of art or a certain material, like a wood or a tile or granite. Maybe it's a color palette you like. Maybe it's a piece of furniture. If you have an heirloom China cabinet that you want to base your space around, or maybe you love your couch and you want to make everything else match to that couch. You want to pick one thing that you can then make your decisions around that. For me in my kitchen, the number one thing I'm basing everything else around is I want my pantry doors to be in a gray washed white Oak. Or something that gives that same look of this wood tone with kind of a gray base, not too gray because I know grays are going out. But something with gray tones, gray toned wood.
So for me that determines that the floor color should be the gray tone for color, because that way it ties it all in. It makes it feel modern. It flows well together. And so that determines the floor color, not the floor color determining the cabinet color for me. So pick something that is your determining factor and let everything else be based around that.
For you, it could be that you're obsessed with navy blue and you want a navy blue feature wall. Well make sure that everything compliments that navy blue feature wall. Maybe for you, you have a chandelier that you're obsessed with and you want to base your aesthetic decisions off that chandelier, which maybe has brass in it. And so now, you know, okay, my hardware in my kitchen and the drawer pulls, the sink, all of that should be a brass to match. So what is your pillar piece?
And don't base this off of something that could easily change. When it comes to this, do you want to think about the things that are going to be more permanent in your space. When I was originally thinking about floor colors and the color of that pantry cabinet that I wanted, I thought about my dining table that's right off the kitchen. My dining table is a little darker wood. I said to my sister, well, maybe I should go with a little bit of a darker wood tone for that pantry because the dining table is a darker wood tone. And my sister said, no, no, no, your table can change. But those pantries will be a lot more expensive and harder to change out, as well as that determines the floor color from the pantry color, so if I'm basing the floor color off of something that's related to this table that the table could easily change. I don't want to base everything off that table. That table is something that, yes, I love it. It'll probably be in our house for another 10 years, but that definitely is a changeable item. So make your decisions based off of more permanent items that aren't as easy to update and change and switch out.
Step 4: Start Honing Your Ideas
So step number four is to now start honing your ideas. This means you need to get a little bit more specific of ideas than just going on Pinterest and Houzz. You want to go visit showrooms, see what you like in person, because it could look a lot different. Get actual floor swatches, get paint, not just the little square that comes from the paint shop, but actually get samples of the paint that you can start painting in the space, because your lighting will change how things look in your house versus a showroom versus just a picture online.
So start seeing things in person, bring home some swatches, some samples. Whatever you can bring home, whether it's fabric swatches, cabinet styles. Start tying things together, narrowing down. Go through your Pinterest board and delete any that aren't in line with this style that maybe don't flow as well with that pillar piece that you picked out.
Step 5: Visualize Your Space
Now step number five is to visualize the space which this goes along with last week's episode, episode 10 on how to envision your decision. For something like house remodels, building from scratch, your design, it is so important to get good visuals before you jump in, because these are expensive projects typically, and you don't want to spend all this money to hate something or realize that it's awkward or weird or not what you want.
There are design softwares out there that either contractors have access to, or you can purchase a monthly subscription to, to be able to do a 3D mock-up of your space. There are AI programs out there that do this. Now, I have to say we tried a few AI programs. And the landscaping one for our backyard was laughable. I mean, they have like random, maybe six inch pathways, just kind of circling into our yard ending in nowhere, like a letter C. I'm like, what is that? So definitely make sure you find a good one if you're going to use an AI program. But there are programs out there and they're getting better and better every day. So you can use an AI program to help you visualize the space.
I'm a Photoshopper because of my graphic design background. I like to mock up the space ahead of time. I did that for both of my sons nurseries before they were born. And that way I could play around with things, to scale, of what decor do I want on the wall? What wall treatment do I want? What flooring should we put in? What color of paint? And get it the way I wanted it to. And then I handed it off to my husband and said, make it happen. And that way Josh had a to-scale version of exactly what I wanted and could bring my vision to life because I had Photoshopped it and played around with it until I was happy with what I wanted. Now my favorite DIYer is Lindsay Dean of Frills and Drills. Love her Instagram. She will place blue tape, just painters tape on the floor and walls to mock things up and be able to see the size of things. She'll even put where a lamp would be by drawing it out with tape on the wall and then the size of your couch and the coffee table. And that way you're starting to see that what looked like in a picture was a cool couch, might be really puny in a big room, or it might be too big for a small room. So start measuring things out and actually getting a feel for what it will look like.
I know Lindsay Dean also will mock things up in Canva. It's a free design program. You might have to pay for the premium version in order to remove the background from things, so if you have a picture of a dresser and you want to remove the background, so you can place just the dresser in your space, then just pay for the premium for one month and be able to mock it up. So she drags things around in Canva or even Instagram stories, you can do mock-ups and get a feel for different things. Now, sometimes it will be harder to get it to scale. But at least that'll give you a visual representation of, oh, does this paint color go with this wood tone? Or does this chair look better than that chair? So things like that are easy to get a visual for when you plug it into a design program.
Now when my husband and I were first starting to plan out our new kitchen, we thought, I wonder if we could switch our dining space and our kitchen space in order to have a bigger kitchen? Because our kitchen space is just so tight. And so I came up with a great, brilliant floor plan in my head and drew it out kind of that bird's eye view, on paper. And on paper, it seemed like it would work. But we have a double fridge that is a non-negotiable for us to keep, I am not downsizing my fridge just for the sake of opening the space more or having a nicer kitchen. I have two boys that will be teenagers at some point. We are going to need all that fridge space. So, I had moved that to the right of the kitchen sink in my new mock-up of switching the dining and the kitchen space. And it looked great on paper from just above drawing. Then my husband plugged it into a 3D design program, and I realized that putting a 33 inch fridge to the right of your sink makes it feel like you've got a giant wall next to you. That takes away from the openness that I was hoping to achieve by switching the kitchen and the dining room. So by doing that, or if we had marked it out with the blue tape on the floor, we would have realized this is not a good idea. So make sure you're doing things to actually visualize the space, measure things out, mark it out, do what you need to do in order to get a good visual and that will save you so many headaches down the line. Time, money, all that goes into making these big design changes, just by mocking things up and laying them out and taping them out.
So start to bring home all of your swatches, the materials, lay them out next to each other, put it in your space, get the visual of what it's going to look like.
Step 6: Keep Tweaking Until You Love It
Then step number six is to keep tweaking until you have it right. You want to make sure everything flows, everything looks good together. So if you think you have all of your cabinet doors and flooring picked out, but you can't find a countertop that flows with it, then you have to decide which one are you going to change? If you love, love, love a certain countertop but it doesn't quite match the cabinet color, then maybe you change the cabinet color. Or if you're happy with the cabinet color you've picked out then keep looking for more countertop options: go to more showrooms, explore more options, keep working at it until you get it right. Because a lot of these really big decisions you're making for your home are going to be more permanent and you want to like it longterm. You don't want to compromise just for the sake of picking something from what's in front of you, or just for the sake of time of not wanting to spend the time to really get it right.
Bonus Home Decorating Tips
So those are the six tips for making these aesthetic decisions and picturing it in your head what it's going to look like. I do have a few just kind of bonus tips for you for when you're involved with these aesthetic projects.
1: Don’t just go with what’s trendy, go with what you like
So one is to not just go with what's trendy, go with what you like. Now if what you like happens to be what's trendy, then that's great. But especially for anything, that's a very permanent expensive feature, you want to make sure you really like it. And aren't just choosing it because it's in, because in 15 years, when it's out of style, you don't want to hate it because you chose it only because it's in style.
In Florida right now, one of the big trends is to have a black roof with a black garage door, a black front door, black trim. And I think it looks really, really classy on a lot of houses. Some, not quite as much. But the problem is black roofs are going to make your house so hot. Like we are in Florida, the black attracts the heat. I had a black car. When I would go to the beach, I could squeeze my wet hair onto the car and the water would immediately evaporate and just leave a little salt stain on my car. Black attracts heat. So do you really want to go with something that, when it's out of style in 10, 15 years, you're stuck with this really heat conducing black roof, because it was in trend? Now if you love it, then go for it. I am all about choosing what you like over choosing what's trendy. But that's just me. That's always been me. I never wanted to follow fashion trends just because they're trendy. Sometimes I'm about five years late to the train on those fashion trends. Like skinny jeans — I did not buy into that for at least three years, maybe more. And there's a lot of fashion trends that I just won't jump on board with at first. Same with home decor trends.
I am not one to jump on the trends and that's just my personality. For you it might be more important. That's why it's important to determine those goals and your priorities so that, you know, what's important to you.
2: Enlist help — get design direction from an expert or a friend
And then another tip is to enlist help, especially if design doesn't come as natural to you. So for me, I am a graphic designer. I've always had a love and passion for art, and I do feel I have a pretty good artistic eye and that I can make things cohesive. I know what looks good together, and I know what my style is. Some of you might have no idea what your style is and you might need a little help determining what actually flows together, or you might need help envisioning your space and you need an interior designer or a contractor to mock it up for you and give you the ideas instead of you giving them the ideas, which is what I'm doing.
3: Get on the same page with your spouse
And then the last tip is to try to get on the same page as your spouse. And find ways to make you both happy. Because design and home choices are things you're both going to be living with and you want to both be happy. My husband and I, as I shared before, are both on different pages when it comes to the flooring. So instead of just one of us compromising on the flooring, we are exploring more options. The one flooring company that made my parents flooring has the real thick 3/4" engineered hardwoods, and they only come in a few different colors. So now we're thinking, okay, we can compromise a little bit on the thickness of the board and maybe go with a 5/8th thickness, which won't be able to be resanded as many times, but that's probably not a huge deal. And that way we have more stain options to choose from. We are waiting for those samples to get in, so make sure you follow me on Instagram so you can follow those stories and see all of our design choices and maybe even help us make some decisions there.
So I hope that you found this fun and helpful. If you know of anyone who is about to build a house, remodel their house, make some big changes to their interior design and their home space, then, do me a favor and send this episode to them so they can get these tips on how to visualize and choose design elements.
I also would love to host an interior designer on my show to dive even deeper about how to make these aesthetic decisions, because honestly, I made it sound like it's super easy for me, but it's still a struggle. I have shared before how it takes me about 18 paint swatches on the wall before I can pick a paint. So I definitely still struggle with perfectionism and being very picky with my designs and aesthetics. So I would love some tips myself on how to get a little faster and better at those design choices without having to have a million different samples placed in front of me. So if you know of anyone, send them my way. Otherwise I am reaching out to some people to try to find an awesome guest on your aesthetics.
That is all for today. As always, if you want to find any of the links that are mentioned in this episode, such as other podcast episodes or people that I mentioned, places, things like that, and definitely head on over to the show notes at anchoreddecisions.com/11. Tune in next Thursday for another episode. And I will see you all on social media.