Conquering Your Design Fears

Hi Everyone!

**Let me start off by saying a huge Thank You to everyone who’s given me input on how to help style the open shelving.  You guys are the best.  I’m planning on incorporating many of those ideas soon!**

I ran across this article on Lonny last night about conquering your interior design phobias and it really helped me to let go of some uncertainty I’ve been struggling with lately.  This particular excerpt stood out to me the most:

Over the past couple days I’ve been racking my brain and driving my self up the wall over an idea I have to make a pretty big change in the house.   I mean, it really isn’t that big of a deal, but it goes against the “natural” flow of our home and what’s typical of our floorplan.

You see, we have one of those houses.  You know, one of those houses with a formal living room, formal dining room, eat in kitchen/dining and family room.  While its nice to have all the space, I’m faced with the fact that we don’t actually use a pretty significant portion of our house.  That’s a major problem for me.  It goes against the very core of what I believe in from a design perspective and it definitely isn’t helping with my personal goal of living with intention.  Aside from that, we write a check every month for that square footage and I’ll be damned if I keep paying “the man”  for nothing!

Since the day we moved in Ive been trying to figure out just what the heck to do with the formal living/dining combo.  We aren’t formal living and dining kinda people so I knew there was no way I was about to do the whole “set the room up with furniture just to let it collect dust and be seen errnowandagain” thing.  So, as embarrassing as this is to admit, the room has been sitting empty all this time. The biggest issue with the space is its the first room you see when you enter our home.  As a matter of fact, you literally walk right into the room since we don’t have a proper foyer, so its created a challenge for me as I’ve tried to sift through ideas on what exactly to do with it.  Space planning is my absolute favorite aspect of design so its been driving me crazy not being able to pin down a solution.  Over the last 2 years I’ve determined it would be an office, a library, a game room, and reading room (in any given combination). Still nothing ever really felt right.

Then I started thinking about my love for bungalows, cottages, and older homes and realized that those homes are made much like mine now where you enter the home straight into the living area.  This got me thinking (which is never a good thing if you ask my dear wife) and I decided It may be a good idea to do a room flop.  Basically I’d like to make the front room/formal rooms into our family room and turn what we are currently using as the family room into a large entertaining space. 

This could actually work, guys. 

As of right now I’m about 99% sure its what we are going to do, but there are still a few minor details to hash out. 

The point behind this incredibly lengthy post is this: Trust Yourself.  I’m a very bold, confident person and I’m certainly not afraid to push the envelope, and break a few rules when it comes to design choices, but for some reason I just couldn’t get out of my own head on this one.  Once I got out of it, I was able to see things from a different perspective. 

So what are your design fears?  Have you been too deep in your own head about anything lately?  How do you feel about living spaces that greet you at the front door?  I would love to hear your take on things.  Until next time…..

XoXo-Shavonda

Posted By: Shavonda Gardner · In: interiors