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A peek inside of my favorite place in the world.

When I was a kid, I collected Teen Beat and Bop. I even had a healthy stack of Delia catalogues that I’d dog-ear and circle, knowing damn well I’d never acquire any of it. That rolled into Seventeen, Teen People, then Jane and Cosmopolitan. At some point, I started collecting Us Weekly magazines in my early 20s. After that, it just started to peter out.

At some point last year, I was missing the monthly surprise that comes in the mail in the form of a magazine. I wanted something I could physically flip through, not scroll. I wanted to cut things out and make a collage. So I subscribed to Magnolia. Naturally. My daughter and I sat down and oohed and aahed over The Gaines’s mountain home, a place I told her would be a dead ringer for something I would design. We talked about the wall paper, the throw rugs, the exposed wooden beams, and the intricate details. She pointed out the garden and mentally placed a fairy house by one of the trees. We talked about how genius it was for their designer to choose such rich, dark colors for the home, considering all of the floor to ceiling windows. We talked color palettes.

My daughter is an artist, who spends all of her free time creating. She appreciates art in all forms. I declared to her that this was my art—interior design. Like her, I can sit for hours, poring over kitchens and sitting rooms, gardens and reading nooks. It brings me so much joy.

My husband and I bought our home in 2012, a year before we were married. Over the last 14 years, we’ve ripped down walls, added shelves, painted, pulled up layers of carpet and completely replaced floors. We’ve busted open walls and replaced pipes, stripped layers of paint from the staircase, revealing the natural wood beneath. We’ve rearranged, added and taken away. And after all these years, our home finally feels like us. For too many years, I allowed myself to follow trends or be influenced, somehow convinced that what I had wasn’t enough. At some point, I stripped it all down and instead, allowed myself to be pulled by what lit me up instead. That means lots of trips to yard sales, estate sales, thrift stores, antique stores, and flea markets. It meant scouring FB Marketplace and browsing clearance racks in my favorite stores to find what felt like us.

Like the dining room table I found on FB Marketplace years ago. I had my husband run out to get it that day and when he brought it home, I was horrified to learn it was a hightop. As in, even at 6’ 3”, my husband was still hiking his leg up to get on one of the chairs. With two very young kids, it wasn’t going to work. So my husband pulled everything out to the porch and sawed it all down to a normal height. Problem solved.

Or the gold ornate mirror I spotted at a flea market that caused me to gasp, shove my things into my husband’s arms, and take off running for it, in pure fear that someone would spot it before I would. It’s old and it’s heavy and completely imperfect. And it was $30, haggled down from $50, because it’s just what you do.

Any update we’ve done in our home has been on a budget. My husband owns a painting business, so that’s one expense we’ve never had to consider (minus the cost of paint). Anything we could do with our own hands, we’ve done. Like knocking down walls and pulling up carpet and scraping away layers of paint from our stairs. Or the custom bookshelves my husband built and installed when I said I wanted my own little library.

Our artwork is done by our children or people we know. Family photos fill in the other spaces, a constant reminder of what we have. The basket next to our couch is filled with blankets all hand-knit by my mother-in-law with the highest quality yarn. You just can’t find blankets like these in the stores.

I love the history of this house, the past that was built into this place before we ever set foot into it. The arched doorways, the vintage stove, and black and white tiles that line our kitchen walls. I’ve brought a lot of old into this house—things recycled, reused, repurposed. But it’s the etching along our banister leading upstairs that gets me.

Sometimes I catch myself daydreaming about leaving. I think about being someone more in nature, somewhere with less traffic, less people. I think about something bigger. And then I remember that we have access to several trails, all within minutes of us. The traffic sounds like ocean waves if you close your eyes. The people, our neighbors, are perfection. We look out for each other. And we don’t need anything bigger. My kids have their own rooms. My husband has his recording studio downstairs in the basement. We have a playroom. How could we need bigger?

This is the place we came to after we got married. The place we brought both of our babies home from the hospital. It’s the place we lost our dog in and planted our first tree. It’s where we’ve hosted our annual Christmas Eve party for the last decade. It’s where so much growth has happened. It’s our safe space, where we can be ourselves and walk around without pants if we want to. It’s a dream.