september

God bless America, it's high of 70 in upstate South Carolina today. All the windows in the house are open, I have homemade zucchini chowder leftovers (gooood), and I'm wearing a sweatshirt! When the first cool-down of the year comes I can't help but go in cleaning mode. My hallway is lined with piles of white sheets and kids' blankets to wash, and every bed gets a spritz of this inexpensive lavender room spray. My mom used to use it growing up and it gives me the most magical cozy feeling. That or mulling spices in a simmer pot on the stove are my instant pick-me-ups for home.

(Enjoy the quick living room snap above - see if you can I Spy a Magic Tree House book left behind)

Life-wise, five months ago we moved cities to a rental that has been seriously such a gift. There are a lot of funny little things about it (mismatched wood floors, really obvious paint touch ups) but it has beams in the kitchen and the perfect layout for our family right now! Our furniture thankfully works well even if it's not how I would "design" it in here. We had to sell some of our furniture (this rental is 1400 sq ft, which is exactly half the square footage of our old house) but what we had works well enough!

The day before moving at our old house - bye bye to the cool chairs that I no longer have room for! Sold to a friend so I still occasionally see them on Instagram :)

I don't have to stay in a place that's perfect, but I think I would feel creatively crushed living somewhere that had been carelessly flipped or cold feeling. I'll take mismatched wood floors and orange-toned cabinetry over a brand new contractor special any day of the week :) One thing I did splurge on was organizing items - we are renting this place, but I cannot live an entire year in clutter. This house has normal bedroom closets, then one small linen closet and another coat closet. That's it!

I switched out the hardware and the light fixture in this kitchen, but I think my sprucing will stop there. I can paint if I want to (it's grey in the main areas right now), but I will probably only do that if we decide we are renting here one more year. The color is not offensive, just not cohesive with everything else being so warm-toned (honey cabinetry, faux terra-cotta tile, warm brown flooring).

Personally, we set out for this year to be a pretty radical reset of sorts for our family, so my highest goals for living here are it being inviting, somewhat nice looking, and comfortable. I have my mental energy into a lot of life changes and the house just can't be a major source of output for me right now. We desperately needed to feel what a year of no renovating felt like after 10 years (!!) of major house projects in two old houses.

The gist of the reason for the life-overhaul was this: we were so stressed and didn't realize it. My husband Madison and I are both, in different ways, really into details and getting obsessive about doing something to a high degree, and at some point it became way too much and we came to terms with having to make a huge change. Houses, homeschooling, hosting, being way overly involved in a church, jobs, health stuff - it all set the stage for us to be like WHAT are we even doing? It's been a slow unraveling, but the first choice we made was to step away from the church we were at, then move back to my hometown of Greenville, SC (I'm originally from Simpsonville but we now are right on the edge of Traveler's Rest). Yes, that meant we left the fully renovated home we had just finished. LOL. Maybe the best decisions rarely make much sense on paper.

I cannot even begin to tell you how much I love being back. The crazy thing I keep telling everyone is the grass here smells different when you cut it. Whatever the smell is takes me back to my childhood and I just can't live anywhere else again. We live 6 minutes from my mom now, plus a hop skip and a jump away from the Blue Ridge Mountains - both of which are an unbelievable joy to me. To take my kids to the waterfalls and rivers where I played in as a kid is about as good as it gets.

Work-wise, I am finally ready to ramp up my design consulting. If you're new, the backstory is this - I worked for an interior designer for a year and a half in Columbia before briefly switching jobs then starting out on my own to create Cultivate Interiors at 23. (Fun fact - before starting out on my own I worked for several months as a receptionist at a laser hair removal center because I needed a job ASAP. Absolutely wild environment and it ended badly but hey, they let me redecorate the lobby). I was a full-service designer and was really beginning to make traction (I even blogged for Erin Napier of HGTV HomeTown for a bit).

My old business cards. I hand-sketched the fern then scanned it as my logo. I might bring it back - it was cool!

In the middle of that as a really wonderful surprise, I got pregnant with my daughter who is the best, but oh my gosh, becoming a mom shifted my world completely. She was a screamer and the lack of sleep about knocked me off my rocker (and this was all only five months before COVID hit!)

Me, half-dead on the couch at our first house while my mom came to the rescue. I was one month postpartum and a couple of weeks away from having surgery for something my OB ignored me about! Being a mom is EASY and FUN at ALL TIMES! But my mantel looks nice I think.

I stopped taking clients altogether for about a year, then ventured into homeschooling in the following years while I took clients all by word of mouth in a strictly consulting manner (no managing the project). I no longer homeschool, but along the way also had a son who is hilarious and so, so loud.

Balancing expectations of myself and of motherhood is such a wild challenge I had no idea I would ever feel. I think before I became a mom I imagined I would feel so motherly all the time (lol) and couldn't even conceptualize feeling grief about entering into a totally new way of life. I imagined life would be simple and joyful and I wouldn't want to work at all. Maybe in some other time or culture it wouldn't feel so jarring, but for me it did, and compounded with lack of sleep and recurring fatigue issues I often felt like I was floundering in figuring out what the heck I was supposed to be doing. What amount of selflessness did this new human being require? Was I uneccesarily driving myself into the ground or actually practicing for sainthood? Throw in 40 books about parenting and 27 opinions on how to get your kids to sleep and you've got the gist of my first foray into motherhood. Nuts.

BUT. Here we are today where I feel in some ways more settled than ever and in others comically out of control. This could absolutely be the "wrong" time to ramp up designing again but I just can't take not doing it anymore! I never fully stopped, but I had very little online presence for years until now. Here goes nothing!

That's it for today! Blogs are dead but I don't care!!