Oh hi there, it’s me, Colleen, the girl who rented a house over FaceTime a week before driving 30 hours from Chicago to Los Angeles with her husband and dog, had a minor meltdown when she walked through it in person for the first time, and has been “renovating” it ever since (and by that, I mean doing low cost simple fixes, like pulling up carpet, painting and replacing fixtures) along with thoughtfully decorating it into a dream home.

This page exists because I have been getting many questions, that mostly fall into three categories:

1. About our rationale for renting this place to begin with, and spending the time to make it nice: “You’re nuts to do this much work on a rental!” or “How much are you paying?” or “Is your landlord reimbursing you for all this?”

2. About how to create a vision for a space with lots of problems, and bring it to life without spending a ton of money: “How did you think of that?!”

3. About where to find certain things we have bought for the place, or on paint colors or my thought process for each room.

So I am going to address each of those questions here, and continue to update this page as we progress, because I am not special and these are things that anyone can do if they’re willing to challenge their thinking and do some work!

A perspective on renting beneath your means, and doing work to make it a dream place

If you’ve been following my work for awhile, you’ll know that financial well-being is a huge priority for me and my husband, that we have worked for years to build a buffer of savings and to be very thoughtful about our spending (only on what we need and truly value) so that we can contribute generously to investments and retirement accounts as well as to causes we care about. We both value freedom to make choices and decisions out of love, instead of out of fear or lack, and this is only possible for us because we have intentionally “lived beneath our means.”

It’s what allowed my husband to leave his job for 5 months to help take care of his dying father. It’s what allowed me to take 6 months off of work for a sabbatical, and consider a major career shift. Money is not a deciding factor in our decisions because we planned and worked for years to have that freedom.

As someone who used to truly detest even the word “budget,” I know how unsexy it sounds to live beneath your means and to only spend on what you need and truly value (and even defining what you" “truly value”).

But having what I like to call an “eff it” buffer beyond your job income creates a neutral mindset towards money and income (versus an attachment mindset), and has allowed us to make decisions that have brought so much joy and happiness to our life.

All that being said, living in a gorgeous all-white penthouse in Los Angeles is not something either of us value, and it is not worth the arm-and-a-leg rent prices here to us. We would rather put that money into savings and investments, and have it growing for us for when we do eventually buy another home.

What we do value is a house in a safe, walkable neighborhood, with space for us to have guests, have at-home offices (because, who knows how long we’ll be quarantined here…), with outdoor space to enjoy the California climate and also check boxes like having a garage for two cars, a laundry room, and at least two bathrooms.

So in searching for a place, we aligned on those requirements and looked at several options. When we took a FaceTime tour of the house we ended up renting, we could see that it checked every box… but would need some decor love: on the tour, the landlord told us that he had just painted every room yellow, and put office carpeting over the original hardwoods in the family room and one of the bedrooms.

So we thought about it, and went back to him with some negotiating points on rent and work that needed to be done, along with permission to undo some of the work he’d just completed…

…and after we walked through it in person, we added a few more negotiating points of work that needed to get done immediately, before we moved in.

Being a rental, we wanted to have as little “sunk costs” on the updates as possible, willing to do work but not willing to pay a lot on supplies. So, the work we took on ourselves was simply painting (using mostly leftover white paint the landlord left in the garage), ripping up carpets and taking down light fixtures (with permission from the landlord that we would furnish our own fixtures and take them with us when we eventually move out).

After several weeks of work, along with decorating, the house looks a far cry from the sad budget rental it once was, and we are enjoying our beautiful L.A. home that checks all the boxes while also continuing to feed our savings and investments.

How to create a “vision” for a space, and bring it together without spending a lot of money:

Research suggests that constraints inspire creativity, but that you have to be willing to stretch your mind a bit in order to see possibilities beyond the current reality.

Although I think I tend to be a highly visual person and I actually do “envision” possibilities, layouts, colors, etc., it actually stems from asking myself a few questions when I walk into a room:

• What are the good things about this room that should be emphasized? Are there lots of big windows, tall ceilings, a fireplace, original parquet floors, lots of space? And… how might I amplify those? Bring attention to the windows and natural light with breezy drapes hung high, add some restorative polish to the floors? Arrange the room to make best use of the space and amplify a focal point?

• How can I use what I have to eliminate or minimize the bad things? Lights can come down and be replaced, carpet over hardwood can be pulled up, and paint fixes pretty much every ill, ugly window treatments can be taken down and cheaply replaced.

• Who will spend time in this space, and how do I want them to feel in it? For me, I want my home to be colorful, comfortable, welcoming, relaxing, and lived-in, so the people who spend time there never want to leave (what can I say, I’m a homebody). Getting specific on how each room will be used helps set the tone: for the family room, it will strictly be used to relax, so I wanted neutral, calming colors and a huge comfy sofa with room for many. For the dining room, it will be used as a place to eat and connect, and a centerpiece of the house, so I chose to go with bold paint, a fun light fixture and happy art to make it fun to walk by many times a day.

My DIY thought process and sources for each room

We wanted to start with the common living spaces, because the bedrooms were actually OK (needed window treatments and fixtures, but no painting or other major work) and those were the rooms that will get the most use in our house.

Here’s what the living room looked like the day we got keys to the place…

Living room DIY design update:

See what I mean about the fluorescent office lights on the ceiling and freshly painted yellow walls? But there are also obvious good points: it’s a huge space, the ceilings are high, the windows are big, and the floors (although distressed) are original parquet from the 1920s.

Below is the “after” (still in progress, need to finish the ceiling, put up drapes, etc.). All I did was invite my husband’s friend over to help us remove the fluorescent lights (he offered to help, which one should never do with me), apply a couple coats of cheap white paint, put some Liquid Gold on the floors, and add our stuff and it became a different room. Total cost was around $50, I did the labor and counted it as a workout (which I had not been getting enough of while quarantined).

We also added breezy curtains, using $8 cafe rods and curtains at a standard 84” length that we will take with us when we eventually move.

(Will update this pic, the wires have been tucked in and ceiling holes patched since I wrote this. BTW, all it took was a coffee filter stuffed in the hole, a piece of masking tape over it, some spackle and white paint.)

Dining room DIY design updates:

The photo above is the “before” picture, but does not give the full view. That patched wall you see had this cornucopia of tangled electrical wires hanging out of one wall that made my heart sink to the floor when we walked through it. (See picture below, I called the landlord and he removed it that very night, along with making several other changes.)

The house is a Spanish style 1920s bungalow, and the dining room is the exact center of what is basically a circular layout. I wanted it to look like a centerpiece and center of gravity in the home, so decided to go bold with an almost-black gray paint (Sherwin Williams “Sealskin”) for the base of the walls and used the same cheap white paint for the upper parts of the walls.

It also had a delightful fluorescent light that my husband’s friend helped us remove, and I touched up the ceiling and installed this light fixture. We bought it for our master bedroom in the Chicago rowhouse we owned and sold in November, I loved the look and the price then and still do! We will take all fixtures with us when we leave, and cleared it with the landlord to take down and throw out the old lights without replacing them.

Here’s the DIY designed dining room now:

Family room DIY design updates:

In keeping with the urine yellow paint and fluorescent light theme, here’s what the family room looked like when we first saw it in person (I pulled the rug up as an instinctual reaction to confirm that the original hardwoods were, in fact, underneath the eyesore carpeting):

The floors were in pretty decent shape, just some paint splatters that we figured would be covered by the big sectional. We ended up deciding to get a rug to warm up the space and also balance out the textured popcorn ceiling which I was not going to attempt to fix because that is beyond my DIY interests…

Here it is with the rug added and lights taken down. We went with a big sisal area rug, for texture and durability and also because I just love the natural look it brings to a room (we also used this rug in our Chicago row home and loved it, so knew immediately I wanted to add one here.)

Although it took us several weeks, we decided to get a custom U-shaped modular sectional from a small furniture designer in L.A. We had been craving a big gathering sectional for ages, but just never had the space. This room was perfect for it, and we know that it’s a piece we will use for years to come (and can store parts of it if we need to fit into a new space down the road). We also hung high drapes to emphasize the windows and natural light in here (they still need to be steamed, forgive me) and have since capped and tucked the wires and patched the ceiling holes using my same coffee filter-masking tape-spackle hack mentioned above.

Here’s what it looks like now:

Office DIY design update:

The office was by far the worst room in the house: it had the same yellow paint, fluorescent lights and ugly carpeting, as well as a weird interior window to the laundry room and a floating air duct vent thing that was an eyesore dot com.

Here’s a picture of what it looked like for the first month we lived here:

Honestly, we weren’t sure it could be saved so were just using it as overflow storage for awhile. I would wander in here, stand under the blue buzzing office lights and stare at that window and duct trying to think of how I could fix or minimize them using what I had.

“Could I just knock it out?” I thought to myself, envisioning the HVAC nightmare I could cause and the expense of having to do drywall over that window, and have zero skills in drywall repair.

“Maybe hang a big curtain over it?” I thought, envisioning a mocked up closet space. But the problem is that I hate curtained off regions of homes. I don’t know why, I just can’t do a curtain unless it’s on a window or a shower.

One day, while starting at it, I thought about how to integrate the air duct box into the rest of the wall. “It wouldn’t look that bad if it seemed intentional, like part of a shelf,” I thought.

So I pulled out my tape measure, did a little research, and considered what the dimensions would need to be given that the window would limit wall space for mounting brackets. Then I walked through the house, looking for what I might use to build some shelves. “Maybe some of the kitchen cabinet shelves could work,” I thought. The measurements didn’t quite work.

Then, while clearing out the garage, I found a giant slab of sheetrock leaning against the wall. I measured it, and figured I’d have just enough to do the minimum shelving I’d need. I decided that I could just use thick brown construction paper to cover the window and use some masking tape to hold it down, and the paint and accessories would make it look like a solid wall–especially if I painted it a dark color.

Here’s what it looked like at the beginning of my amateur “install” (and note the horrible condition of the floors we found under the carpet–more to come on that):

So, I borrowed my brother-in-law’s saw, and started cutting everything to the dimensions I needed and got to work hanging them. Once I had the shelves figured out, I went through the paint options and had enough black spray paint and leftover “Sealskin” from the dining room. Here’s what it looked like with just the base coat of spray paint done:

After I finished the top coat with “Sealskin,” I got to work painting the walls with the same white leftover paint as the other rooms and a couple with whiteboard paint (which was about $20 on Amazon and so worth it, as I’ve already been white boarding ideas and plans in here).

I also had my husband’s friend come over (bless you, Thiago) to help me take down the fluorescent lights and install the very hip fixture I got for in here, and used a basic white deck paint for the floors along with ordering rug to match the one in the family room and hide some of the ills of the floor in here…

…and just as I painted myself out of the room and cracked the door to step outside, my dog came flying in here like a bat out of hell so I had to re-do the whole thing (facepalm).

After re-doing the floor and giving it ample time to dry, the fun parts began: hanging curtains, styling the shelves, adding the rug and other furniture. I still need to do some touch ups (like second coat over where the fluorescent lights used to be, and finding a great desk chair) but could not be happier with the outcome considering where we started.

Here’s what it looks like now:

(I am currently sitting on that pink chair writing this to you. It’s a dream workspace for me, brought to life with creativity and a place where lots of creative inspiration will happen as well.)

More to come! Thanks for your interest and if you have questions, just leave a comment and I will get back to you!

Your Internet friend,

Colleen