How to Intentionally Create Your Dream Home

A strategic guide to redecorating your home (from a corporate girly)

Like most people in the entire world, I spent a LOT of time at home in 2020 in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Add having two babies between 2021 and 2022, and my job transitioning to remote work, and that all adds up to plenty of time within my house’s walls the past several years. I have had time to dwell on all of the design and décor ideas I have and the purchases I want to make to better fill the walls, update hand-me-down furniture, and accommodate our two toddlers’ ‘play all day’ lifestyle. We didn’t invest in too many purchases thinking our home was just going to be a starter home, but now that we may be here longer than anticipated thanks to uncertainty in the housing market, I’m embarking on a journey of intentional home redesign. 

Tackling Home Redesign / Redecorating Like a Boss

I have been overwhelming myself with the ideas I have, how much money I want to spend and how little time I have balancing a full-time corporate career and the roles of a wife and mom. So you know what I have done to help myself? Like the corporate girl boss I am, I have drawn inspiration from my corporate mindset  and developed a step-by-step strategy to navigate the overwhelming task of transforming our home. I adore strategy–it creates a great foundation and roadmap for guiding your actions and if followed ensures that you are staying true to original intent and objectives. Synergy-circle back-pain points- best practices-move the needle-let’s take it offline... Just to add a few more corporate buzzwords in there. 

The following steps are how I have organized my thoughts and created a strategy for how to approach the seemingly endless list of things I want to do to REVAMP my home. Can everyone see my screen? I’ll pull up the PowerPoint deck……….Linda you’re on mute….

Strategic Steps for Approaching a Home Redesign 

1. Create a Vision for your Home

Vision board for my home. See Pinterest for Sources.

This is a fun one. The vision is what you want your home to be. Define the desired future state of your home with a vision board full of pictures of places and things that evoke the kind of atmosphere, environment, and design styles I want reflected in our home. As an adult, these are fun creative activities to do after spending a day in a PowerPoint deck full of KPIs! Also something to look at to focus yourself when you get overwhelmed with everything you want to do. It’s a journey!

2. Identify your Home’s Objectives

Summarize key goals for your home, such as functionality, adaptability, organization, and aesthetic enhancements. My objectives for my home are the following: 

• To serve as a functional but beautiful space where our family can spend time together 

• To adapt to the changing needs of our children as they grow

• To give everything a place (i.e. to organize all our STUFF) and give every place a purpose (i.e. to sleep, to work, to relax)

• To add moments of beauty and design to the everyday

3. Define Tactics that Support your Objectives 

Develop ‘to-do’ and ‘to buy’ lists organized by space to reduce overwhelm define tactics as the ‘to-do’ and ‘to buy’ lists that will help you accomplish your home objectives. I like to organize these by space (i.e. kitchen to-dos, bedroom to-dos, etc) to again reduce the amount of overwhelm.  

4. Prioritize

In my career experience, everything always ends up being due YESTERDAY and everything is a number one priority. The thing is, with redesigning your home YOU are fully in charge. What a relief! I am approaching my home redesign by prioritizing areas that need more immediate changes. Number one being putting final touches on our refinished basement because it’s winter in Wisconsin and the basement playroom is currently where we spend the majority of our time. 

5. Create a Timeline

Develop a realistic timeline to visualize the progression of your home redesign Timelines often slip, because #life. But putting one together can help hold yourself accountable and to also visualize the time it will take to bring your full vision to life. As I mentioned, time is hard to come by these days so it’s important to be realistic about what can be accomplished and when.

6. Allocate budget

Break down projects into manageable pieces and allocate budget for each space.

I have infinite ideas with a limited budget. We’ve avoided a lot of purchases of new furniture or décor for our house because we thought we’d be moving sooner than later. Now that this may not be the case, I have all these ideas of things I want to purchase and see the numbers adding up. Would a strategy be complete without using both PowerPoint and Excel?? Creating a spreadsheet helped me to look at each space of my house and add up the cost of the things I wanted to purchase for that particular space. This breaks projects down into more manageable pieces that can be completed over time, including both small DIY projects or purchases and big ideas about renovations.

7. Execute 

Start with tactic #1! It is a great feeling knowing where to start. Distractions to dive into other tactics will always be there, but if you stick to the order of the priorities you set, your focus will result in your spaces being more complete and functional more quickly. I think having this focus also keeps away the desire to purchase things you don’t need from places like Home Goods and Target that are serving an immediate gratification need but don’t have a place in the list of things you truly want or need to build the intentional home you created a vision for. 

Executive Summary

Spending time on home design is a creative outlet for me that I don’t get to tap into in my 9-to-5, but approaching home redesign with my corporate mindset has helped to organize my ideas and make a plan for accomplishing my larger home vision with true intent behind all decisions. Hope this helps! Hope this finds you well. Per my last e-mail….Best!