Love the House You're In : 40 Ways to Improve Your Home and Change Your Life

Love the House You’re In is about more than creating a beautiful space; it’s about creating a home that reflects you and all that you find comforting and inspiring in your life. Decorating your home can be daunting and overwhelming, but here’s the secret: If you want to love your house, the inspiration and ideas need to come from you. Love the House You’re In provides the tools to do just that. Through 40 actionable steps, you will: • Explore your life story: Mine your life for those things that inspire nostalgia and create a positive connection to memories, explore your family’s heritage, and be conscious of how you want to live now. • Understand what you’re working with: Take stock of your stuff, understand the history of your home, and get clear on the space you have. • Create an inspired action plan: Discover how to approach design room-by-room, find the through-line that ties the whole house together, and work in ways that empower your own ideas and creativity. • Learn the design skills that matter: Get tips on picking paint colors, choosing window dressings, arranging art, and more. When you start decorating your home with you as the starting point, you can create a highly personalized space that reflects your past, your future, and how you want to live today. In the process, you’ll gain the confidence and inspiration to come up with a functional and fabulous living space that’s just right for you and your life. Stop hating your house and start adoring it40 steps to make your home express who you are and work for the way you really live Decorating can be daunting and overwhelming, but heres the If you want to love your house, the inspiration and ideas need to come from you.Interior designer Paige Rien thinks its about more than creating a beautiful space; its about creating a home that reflects you and all that you find comforting and inspiring in your life. Through 40 actionable steps, youll discover tools that will help Explore your life Mine your life for those things that inspire nostalgia and create a positive connection to memories, explore your familys heritage, and be conscious of how you want to live now. Understand what youre working Take stock of your stuff, understand the history of your home, and get clear on the space you have. Create an inspired action Discover how to approach design room-by-room, find the through line that ties the whole house together, and work in ways that empower your own ideas and creativity. Learn the design skills that Get tips on picking paint colors, choosing window dressings, arranging art, and more. When you start decorating your home with you as the starting point, you can create a highly personalized space that reflects your past, your future, and how you want to live today. In the process, youll gain the confidence and inspiration to come up with a functional and fabulous living space thats just right for you and your life. With humor and a dose of reality, Paige Rien gives readers actionable steps to adapt and make their homes work for them, imploring them to ignore outside influences and look inward for inspiration. Readers are asked to think about what makes them unique, not what style they prefer, making their lives and experiences the central focus in composing a very personal, very functional home. As opposed to traditional design books that are often a catalog of a particular designer's work, or a collection of work with no discussion of process, Love the House You're In is all about the reader: uncovering what she needs and desires and providing concrete, doable ideas to take her there. Rien gives readers actionable steps to adapt and make their homes work for them. She implores readers to ignore outside influences and look inward for inspiration. Looking at what makes the house unique, and the "why" of the furniture and knick-knacks you own, will help in making your house into a very personal, very functional home. This is a design book about improving your house that doesn't contain a single photograph. I am not showing you my work and telling you to copy it or emulate it or be inspired by it. There are no before and after shots here, no big reveals, no secret tips, no eye candy. This book is all about what makes you smile and feel good. This book is also about what your house looks like now, and working with that. This book is full of ideas, inquiries, and insights that will get you thinking and moving. I'm so excited to help you fill in the giant blank between “I hate my house! I'm lost” and “I love this space-it's so me.”-- provided by publisher Introduction So, who are you Your house: from nuts to bolts Putting it all together Room-by-room basics Skills you will use Afterword: Letting go of "done".