I Got This Very Wrong…

The mistake I made in my first house — and what it cost me

Our first house was a two-story colonial on the east side of Cleveland. If you're not local, you should know that this part of town is full of history and full of century homes — grand old things with leaded glass and back staircases and stories.

Ours was not one of those. Ours was small and charming enough to have real character, but it came out of a neighborhood built in the late 1950s by one builder working from a handful of floor plans. He'd do the same layout in a few different styles. Same word, different fonts.

For someone whose whole thing is spaces that feel one-of-one, this was maddening. I'd walk into a neighbor's house and know exactly where their kitchen was.

And then there was the flipper.

We bought from someone who had "updated" the house, which meant we spent the next several years quietly un-flipping it — putting back the character that had been stripped out and covered in the same gray-brown everything that was on every listing that year. We did it, and honestly we did it well. But it took about five years before the house felt finished.

Five years. Which turns out to be the whole point of this post.

The actual mistake

I made a lot of small mistakes in that house. That's how you learn, and I'd rather have learned them on my own dime than a client's.

But the big one, the one underneath all the others, was this: I spent real money on real pieces before I knew what I wanted the house to be.

I was impatient. I thought I knew. I didn't know.

Here's what that looked like in practice.

Exhibit A: The very modern living room

Dillon moved in coming from a sleek, downtown, borderline-Bond-villain bachelor apartment. I like cozy. Soft, layered, a little feminine, a lot of texture.

So I did what I think a lot of people do when two lives merge into one house — I overcorrected. I tried so hard to make the space feel like ours that I designed a room that wasn't really either of us. Everything was hard-edged and a little cold, filled out with whatever aggressively modern thing HomeGoods was selling that season.

It looked fine. It photographed fine. It felt like nobody.

We changed it not long after, and I was left with a pile of decor I had no use for and no idea what to do with — bought with money I'd rather have put toward one good piece.

Living with someone means blending two points of view, and that part is real. But blending isn't the same as abandoning your own instincts and hoping the compromise looks like a style. It doesn't. It looks like a compromise.

Exhibit B: The matching bedroom set

I bought a bedroom set. A matching one. Bed, nightstands, dresser, the whole coordinated family portrait.

I know.

In my defense, it was about seven years ago, and I'm proud to report those days are firmly behind me. But the room ended up reading like a boho camping lodge, which is not a genre, and it was the result of me chasing "new" instead of following my gut.

A few years later Dillon went out of town for work and I redid the entire room while he was gone. New bed, new nightstands, new paint, new lighting. All of it.

(He is going to laugh when he reads this, because a work trip remains my favorite project window. There is nothing like an empty house and a one-week runway.)

That room became one of my favorite things I've ever done. But I paid for it twice — once for the version I bought in a hurry, and once for the version I actually wanted.

Exhibit C: Beige. So much beige.

I love a neutral. Neutrals are the foundation of most of what I do and I will defend them to anyone.

But that house was aggressively beige. It was the thing at the time, and I leaned all the way in. Shoji White. Then Shiitake. Warm, safe, extremely of-the-moment, and after a while the whole house started to read like one long uninterrupted sigh.

So I painted again. And eventually I landed somewhere I never would have picked at the start — Pewter Tankard, deep and green and a little moody, and Urbane Bronze, which is nearly black in the evening and completely different at 8am.

That's the part I think about now. It wasn't that the first colors were bad. It's that I had to live in the house for a few years before I knew I wanted depth. No sample board was going to tell me that. Only time in the room was going to tell me.

Three rounds of paint is not a design decision. It's an impatience tax. But the fourth round was the first one that was actually mine.

What it actually cost

The furniture I resold at a loss. The decor that sat in a bin in the basement for two years before I gave up on it. The paint, over and over. The bedroom set I replaced piece by piece.

I've never added it up and I don't intend to.

But the more expensive thing wasn't the money. It was that for the first few years, I lived in a house that didn't feel like mine — because I kept trying to shortcut my way to a finished room instead of letting the house tell me what it wanted to be.

The one thing that survived

My sectional.

Before we moved in together, I was sofa shopping ahead of the move and Dillon suggested I look at West Elm — that's where he'd found his, and he loved it. So I went on, found the Haven sectional, fell for it immediately, and proudly sent him the screenshot.

He called me. "Um. Did you buy the same couch on purpose?"

Same sofa. Different fabric. I had no idea. We still laugh about it.

That sofa has moved with us. It's the only thing from that era that made it, and I've thought a lot about why — because it certainly wasn't a more careful purchase than the rest. I bought it fast, like everything else.

It survived because it has a story attached to it.

What I'd tell you now

Live in the room first. Sit in it at 7am and at 9pm. Notice where the light lands, where you actually put your coffee down, which corner nobody ever walks through. That information is free and it is better than any inspiration photo.

Buy the thing that solves the whole room, not the empty corner. An empty corner is not an emergency. A bad chair bought to fill it is a five-year problem.

Nothing has to match. The matching set is a shortcut that promises cohesion and delivers a hotel room.

And be patient with the blending. If you're merging two lives under one roof, that resolution takes time, and it will not happen because you bought a coffee table you both mildly tolerate.

Here's the thing I only realized while writing this: that house is where my love of curation came from. Collecting slowly. Choosing things that are special, that are one-of-one, that carry a story you can tell at a dinner party ten years later. That's the center of how I work now, and I always assumed it was something I'd learned in the industry.

It wasn't. It came from a small colonial on the east side and a sofa I accidentally bought twice.

The house took five years. It should have. The version of me who wanted it done in eight months paid a lot of money to find that out.

So now, when a client tells me they want to wait on the dining room until they've lived with the kitchen through a season — I tell them that's the smartest thing they've said all week.