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On Slow Decorating and Renovating

In the era of Instagram-popular "before's" and "after's" in a quick swipe or the decades of HGTV 30-min renovation stories, its common to want to renovate your whole home top to bottom as quickly as possible. 

This is especially true for new home buyers. You get the keys and then immediately want to put your mark on each room. In many ways, this a fantastic! You are eager, and thus less likely to let projects sit dormant for decades, and doing a whole house at once will often create a good whole-house flow in decorating as opposed to renovation projects that feel scattered and unrelated. Further, if the home is a 5-year-plan home, then doing projects sooner than later instead of right before you sell, is likely a safer bet. 

However, if you are in your "forever home", there's something to be said for slow decorating and renovating. 

Loving Wit&Delight's slower approach to renovating and decorating their new home


First, not renovating spaces right away will allow you to get a feel for what you really want and need from the space. Perhaps your initial thought was to rip out a tub for a huge shower but a year later, you're pregnant and happy you kept the tub for baby baths! Or maybe you were going to turn a first floor bedroom into a dining room but now your elderly parents need to move in. Or, even more simply and likely, the trends you saw on Instagram and Pinterest don't really fit with your home and putting ship-lap throughout might not be time and money well-spent 5 years down the road. 

The same goes for decorating. While its always good to have a plan in mind when conceptualizing a room, its smart to get a feel for the space, how you use it, how light hits the walls, etc. Further, with slower decorating, you'll likely end up buying things with more character, meaning and hopefully quality. 

So if you are dreaming up a million things to do with a new space, take a minute to collect your ideas but put some of those ideas on the shelf as you live in the space and take the time to make it your own. 

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