If you’ve been following my Instagram feed lately, you may have noticed that I’ve been busy working on a few offline projects, one of which is the re-vamp of my living space. A few months ago, I shared with you guys some of the frustrations I was having with my current bedroom situation (namely, it’s lack of sex appeal.) Since I’m still staying with my Mom here on the West Coast, we made the decision together that I would help fix up an area in the downstairs (ground level) of her house so I could make it my own.
At the time, the space that would become my new bedroom and office was being used as a storage room and was full of art supplies, sewing materials and stuff from my Mom and sister’s Etsy business. Most of my free time in May and June was spent sorting, organizing, rearranging and cleaning to get the space ready. Once that was taken care of, my Mom kindly helped me paint and put together my new furniture. Here are some progress shots, curtesy of Joe the Intern who has been overseeing the whole project.
The room went from being more or less a blank canvas…

I’ve slowly been adding more art work to the walls that what you see below, however I wanted my new space to be as minimal as possible. After years of living with a lot of colour, I was really craving clean white walls and furniture with some fun black & white accents. I have a lot of colourful possessions and I wanted them speak for themselves.



I was so excited to purchase new things for this space and finally unpack old ones that I’d shipped from Toronto, however I ended up getting rid of more things than adding new ones.
My bed-frame and bookshelf are new, however I didn’t purchase much else. The desk featured above was found for free on the side of the road and refinished with the help of my Mom. M new desk chair is an old chair from the garage that was painted to match the desk. When it finally came time to unpack my boxes from Toronto, I grabbed a couple of my favourite books and three items: the pottery pieces that you see sitting on top of my bookshelf. I’d been obsessing over unpacking these boxes for so long, however aside from a bunch of photos that will remain in storage, these were the only things I wanted.
I read a lot and have a bad habit of buying books in bulk. When I was getting ready to move all of my stuff downstairs I had to deal with my “to-read” pile which (literally) was waist high. Some of the books I’d recently purchased, however some had been in the pile for years. Even though I love reading, this pile had been subconsciously stressing me out for quite a while. I’d look over at it while I was trying to write and think “I NEED TO READ ALL THE THINGS AND DO ALL THE THINGS RIGHT NOW” which is neither healthy or realistic. So, I did the thing that made me feel scared and exhilarated at the same time: I packed up 90% of those books and shipped them off to the used book store – one of the best and most freeing decisions I’ve made in a while. When I’m ready to read them I can get them out of the library or I might even get an e-reader.
My live/work space now feels much more streamlined, relaxing and well, me. This has definitely made for more pleasant work days and has encouraged me to be more minimalist in all areas of my life. Joe the Intern agrees.

When it comes to your personal space, what’s important to you?