What are you passionate about?

Thanks for coming back to us, everyone! We took an unexpected break from the blog, but considering people had plenty of things to do with Halloween, I'm sure the time flew by.

Something I can't stop thinking about this week is deciding what to do when you're finally ready to make changes to your house, apartment, office space, or whatever. We have talked about prioritizing renovations around necessity and budget (you can find that post here), but what about that thing that you just really want?

Ok, stay with me here.

When I was getting married, I got a lot of opinions about how the wedding should look. Surprisingly few tips on how the marriage should function, but I suppose that's a topic for a different blog. Anyway, one of the best pieces of advice I got was "choose 3 things that you won't settle on, and then be flexible about everything else." The point is, if you absolutely have to have sunflowers at your wedding, then make it happen. If you don't care about cake flavors (which I actually do care about a lot), then why stress over the difference in a vanilla buttercream and a vanilla bean buttercream?

I think this is the same when it comes to your house. Has cabinet hardware never ruined your entire day? Then maybe that's something that you can find secondhand, or buy in bulk because it is cheaper, and not stress about style and getting something absolutely perfect. Instead, maybe you can't stand your mug shelf in the kitchen because the handles are going every which way. When you are looking for upgrades, it is time to consider custom mug storage (or some kind of display rack!).

This isn't something I can help you decide. Even if I could, I am not the one you want anyway. As you may have guessed, the writer of this blog isn't one of the owners... it is the wife of one of the owners... and I don't have a lot of opinions about the "right" way to do things because I expected to be an apartment dweller my whole life!

What I will say is this - don't compromise. When you see the pictures on our site of the pretty purple office, that's mine and I love it. Tony and Marc tried to talk me out of that much purple, but I was set on it. It is my favorite color, and I had spent some time really considering various shades of purple that would go together. I also had some storage bins already that I liked using, so my shelves needed to be that tall. For you, maybe you don't care about the color of the floor, but you need that "life-proof" stuff because you have 3 cats and a dog and 2 kids still in diapers. Or you want French doors from your dining room to your backyard because you host a lot and that would make it easy in the summer, but you don't care what color the dining room is.

Whatever it is, know what you won't settle on, and stay strong. For everything else, be flexible.