I freaking love flex spaces. Flex spaces are key to use maximization in small houses, especially for families. Having spaces that can serve multiple purposes, at the same time and sequentially over time, is huge. We are lucky to have a very spacious bonus room above our garage, which basically doubles the amount of “communal” space in our house. When the kids were little, it allowed us to have a dedicated play area – full of the usual toys and baby gear – away from our main reception space, the living room. It gave us some breathing room so we didn’t feel like we were drowning in colourful plastic. But it was also a place to store books. An ever-growing number of them. Now that the kids are older, everyone in the family is looking for space to chill in peace away from everyone else; the bonus room is a premium “chill out” zone. And it also doubles as a guest bedroom when needed. Last year, we replaced the couch – which has now relocated to the basement – with a daybed, which can be used both as a sofa and as a bed (it has a proper mattress).

Here was the room about a year into our living in the house; my husband had just added the bookshelves, which completely transformed the space:

But it didn’t look like this for long. Believe me when I tell you that the room looked vastly different when its floor space was taken up by baby gates and rubber mats, and one wall of shelving was filled with nothing but toy bins. We’ve had 3 different couches in this room over time, each one geared towards the needs of the moment. The one in the above photo came from my husband’s college era apartment. The one we had when the kids were babies was a huge, microfiber sectional that we got secondhand, which saw a lot of abuse in its time. The third couch was a major upgrade: a brand-new sectional in a vaguely mid-century style which reflected the ongoing “maturation” of the room along with that of our youngest family members; this piece is now living its second life in the basement.

It’s safe to say that the look of the room now is a reflection of the growth of our family, the development of our aesthetic instincts, and years of collecting via thrift. Most of the décor items are secondhand treasures. The furniture currently occupying this space, apart from the daybed, has been “recycled” from other parts of the house. It all works together … but it didn’t come together overnight.

Here is the side which has has the biggest “glow up” in many ways — it used to be dedicated to toys and children’s books (which have been relocated), and it’s now a space for art & design books, my collection of magazines, and plants.

That blue chair, by the way, is a piece of furniture that my husband built back in his undergrad days. I love having a little piece of personal history tucked away here, amid other accumulated memories of our life together. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years curating various little “vignettes” around the room, and it brings me so much joy to see them all coming together.

The room has no experienced its last evolution; more changes will be afoot in years to come. We need to change the carpet and plan to put in either hardwood or laminate. Area rug(s) to follow, I am sure. There are also 2 rolling staircases that we have been waiting to install, once the kids are old enough. And we will be painting the walls (along with the rest of the house) to match the creamy white we have selected for the basement. We think that colour will really set off the art we have on the walls. And I am sure there will be other changes that aren’t even on our radar at the moment. But that is the beauty of a living space.

Details: C&C dress, Deborah Murray vest, Nocona belt, Chie Mihara shoes, Dooney bag

Thoughts: My quintessential summer outfit: a dress and a vest. I am still looking for my dream white dress, but this one is serving me well in the meantime. I am inching ever closer to full cowgirl mode; I haven’t committed to cowboy boots yet, but I did thrift this horse-patterned vintage vest. I loved the colours most of all, and it suits my summer aesthetic well. White, blue and brown is one of my favourite summer palettes.

Thoughts: I thrifted this Equipment blouse because I love its rainbow pastel colours — you know I can’t resist anything rainbow — and was intrigued by the snakeskin pattern stripes. I don’t usually like snakeskin but this felt like it had potential. I knew immediately that my first outfit would involve this skirt, and I decided to undercut the twee with oversized black accessories – this fab new (to me) necklace and belt. I like using black in this way; the contrast makes the other colours pop more.

Details: French Connection top, Ralph Lauren dress, Talbots skirt, Michelle Ross accessories

Thoughts: Pairing magenta and purple might be a rather “left field” choice, but it’s a combination that feels very happy to me. There is a synergy there, probably because they are both cool toned colours. I took a risk on this skirt because it’s silk and I have a love hate relationship with silk these days BUT I think (hope?) this skirt won’t prove too finicky, care-wise. I’m just a sucker for vintage (lined!) silk even though I’m also a klutz who spills on myself All. The. Time. The skirt is probably from the early 2000s or thereabouts, but the silhouette still feels modern — like something you’d find at Aritzia (except much better quality, hah). That’s basically my thrift mission these days: find high quality vintage versions of modern pieces for a fraction of the current price.

Details: French Connection top, Mexx vest, Banana Republic jeans, Stuart Weitzman shoes, Echo scarf

Thoughts: I’ve been wanting to put together a jeans and vest outfit for a while, but couldn’t quite settle on the right pair of jeans for it. And then these showed up in my life, and I decided the time had come to try again. This is a pretty traditional vest/waistcoat which I think works well for the vibes here, but does require some careful editing. I was afraid the scarf might have pushed the outfit over the top, but adding the sneakers brought it back down to earth.

Details: Urban Outfitters top, Pelican Cove vest, Laura Ashley skirt, Barbara Barbieri shoes

Thoughts: The 90s called and want their everything back. I’m digging it. Someone on IG said this was peak 90210 vibes, and I am not mad about that either. When I was a teen, I could only have dreamed of being that cool. Healing our teenage fashion trauma in our 40s? Sure, why not.

With the basement renos inching closer to completion, the rest of our house is settling back into itself. Any sort of construction is always disruptive, but especially in a small house where storage space is at a premium. Especially when the space undergoing construction used to be the main large storage area available for dumping, well, all the flotsam and jetsam of life. We cleared out a LOT of things, and now that the basement is usable again, all of the things I’ve been saving up to decorate it with are finally in their rightful place. And the rest of the house can breathe again.

As I’ve been going through rooms, clearing out clutter and all the various pieces destined for the basement, I’ve fallen in love all over again with the house. This happens with some regularity. You live in a space and, after a while, you stop seeing it; it just becomes something you take for granted. And then, one day, bam! You see it again with fresh eyes. It’s wonderful! Or full of potential! Or both! I’m a big fan of periodic “refreshes” of our living space. As with everything else in life, the needs for your living space change over time because people – individually and as groups – grow and evolve. Their patterns of living change.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the solution for this is to move to a new house. My husband and I don’t subscribe to it; when we moved into our house – a modest suburban “starter home” by the standards of our city – we very quickly decided that we would not move again if we could help it. The location is great for our family, our housing costs easily manageable, and I never have to think about how to transport 1,800+ books. Instead of moving, we have worked steadily over the last 13 years to “upgrade” our house to suit our changing needs and our aesthetic aspirations. It is a constant work in progress. We’ve had to make peace with that – there will always be a next project, and another, and another. Some of them are functionally necessary (furnaces and roofs need replacing), some are practical (adding shelving for 1,800+ books), some are aesthetic, and some are a combination of all three. The fact that my husband is basically a one-man construction company, who can pretty much build a house from top to bottom, is incredibly helpful. I mean, that’s an understatement. I recognize how lucky we are to have his skills. It does mean that every major project takes, on average, a couple of years to complete because a full-time job, hands-on parenting, and life in general don’t leave a lot of spare time for renos. That’s something else we’ve had to make peace with. Life is not HGTV.

Our house has changed a lot over the last decade, and it will continue to do so. I try to take photos of it at various stages to record its evolution. It’s kinda like our “baby”, you know? It’s nice to be able to look back and see how far we’ve come on.

Take the living room, for example.  Here was its very first iteration:

We had just moved in; two almost-30 year olds, about to get married, on a teeny budget. That leather couch was the most “grown up” piece of furniture we owned at the time. Everything else came from our respective college-era apartments. I don’t even remember what our aesthetic tastes might have been at the time, and you certainly can’t tell what they were from this set-up. I’m glad we didn’t rush out and buy a bunch of new furniture and things to fill up this space, though. I’m certain that whatever we might have picked then wouldn’t be something we would still love now. It’s taken us years of living together to develop our collective ideas about interior design (my husband trained as an architect so I’m sure he had a more robust sense of design that I did at the beginning). Taste and personal style – in interior design as much as fashion – take years to mature. At 30, I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to envision our living room as it looks today, and I would have been amazed to know that this was something we could achieve.

This brings up another important lesson I’ve learned. When I was younger, I was often bowled over by the houses of older acquaintances. They displayed a level of style that I believed could only be achieved by spending pots and pots of money. But I was wrong. You don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of money all at once to create a beautiful space; you just need time. A good part of the beauty of many of those interiors I admired was derived from the fact that they were collected and curated – perfected, if you will – over many years. If I could tell my younger self anything on this topic, it would be not to worry or be too impatient. The process of assembling one’s dream house, piece by piece, is inextricably part of the reason why it’s one’s dream house. Beauty and meaningfulness derive from the process as much as the individual elements.

One last thought. A few weeks ago, I saw an IG post from the Washington Post referencing a study that had concluded, and I quote, that “HGTV is making our homes boring and us sad.” The gist was that watching home renovation media, like HGTV (and I would add, social media like Instagram), leads homeowners to decorate for the masses and not for their own happiness. I didn’t look into the details of the study, but at a gut level, I agree with this. I call it the flattening of viewpoint – people are exposed to a specific aesthetic over and over and seek to replicate it, which reinforces the predominance of that aesthetic and drives out diversity and individuality. Indirectly, this also ties back to what I was talking about earlier – the desire I used to have (which I think is common, especially in younger folks) to want to have a “nice” house instantly. Being presented with a socially-reinforced formula for what a “nice” house looks like feeds the belief that it can be achievable with one click or two clicks. And what’s lost when we adopt that mentality is the whole process of creating meaning and beauty through the expression of one’s ever-evolving viewpoint.

Next week, I can’t wait to talk about our OG flex space (long before the basement): the family/bonus/library room.