棲居美學25 小空間設計 | 新澤西州費爾黑文迷人的牛津角式住宅

Today we're visiting the home of Christina Coletta, a graphic designer, content creator, and mom whose serene Cape Cod style house is shaped by coastal living, family life, and thoughtful design. This Fairhaven, New Jersey home is full of thrifted finds, antiques, and natural materials. The home reflects Christina's love of sustainability, slow renovation, and decorating with meaning. From a cozy sitting room with a wood-burning fireplace, to playful child-centered spaces, every room is designed to grow with her family and tell a personal story. Warm, collected, and deeply intentional, this home proves that the most beautiful spaces are built over time. To watch Christina's home tour ad-free, scan the QR code on screen or visit homeworthyplus.com for access to all of our latest episodes ad-free, and to receive other exclusive membership perks. I'm Alison Kenworthy, the founder of Homeworthy, and on this channel, we take you inside the world's most beautifully decorated homes and introduce you to the brilliant people who live there. Hi, Homeworthy. I'm Liz Lang. Welcome to Gray Gardens. To watch Homeworthy ad-free, visit homeworthyplus.com or scan the QR code on screen. Homeworthy Plus provides an ad-free viewing experience and exclusive content featuring our beloved hosts. Yeah, I can't wait to see them. I'm so excited. And if you're looking to shop items inspired by this and other Homeworthy tastemakers, be sure to use the product links below. Hi, Homeworthy. I'm Tina. Welcome to my home in Fairhaven, New Jersey. Come on in. My name is Tina Coletta. I'm a part-time graphic designer, part-time content creator, and mom, and we are in my home in Fairhaven, New Jersey. My husband and I were actually living in Charlotte, North Carolina when we decided we wanted to move to New Jersey to be closer to family. My husband grew up in this town that we're in, Fairhaven. He loved it. He has such fond memories of his childhood, so we really chose the town first before the house. The tricky part was it was post-COVID. There was low inventory and prices were high, and we were living with our in-laws with our newborns, so we were really struggling to find a place, and we were anxious, honestly, and then we toured this house, and a lot of the houses on the market were going into these crazy bidding wars, so we decided to just dip our toes in the market. I love a Cape Cod-style home. I love old homes. I love small homes, so when we saw this house, I thought it was really, really cute and had a lot of potential, but it did need work, and it was at the tippy top of our budget, so I was nervous, to say the least, but we put an offer in just for ask, and we were absolutely shocked when it was accepted. Our first thought was, why doesn't anyone else want this house? And our second thought was, okay, we're in. We're in Fairhaven, so we were really excited, but also, like I said, a little nervous. It was just kind of a tricky time to buy, which I'm sure a lot of first-time home buyers can relate to right now. I kind of struggled a little bit at first when we bought this house, solely because the house we had when we lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, I deemed my dream house. It was a small 1929 bungalow. It had a white picket fence. It had garden boxes. It had a front porch, screened-in porch in the back, and it was small, and it had all the charm I ever wanted, and I just, I loved that house. We got married in the backyard. There was actually a train that would barrel through the backyard, but I still loved it anyway. It was also on a busy street, so not really the most functional home, but the previous owners had honored that home and taken care of it for decades, and it showed in all the details. So, I think when I toured this house, although I saw so much potential, and I love Cape Cod-style homes, I had just left a house that was, one, half the price, and two, my dream home, but now that I've lived here longer, I've realized that there's something so special about being able to create your own dream home. So, no, this was not my dream home when I bought it. It was not perfect. It needed work, but I really have grown to appreciate and love it, I think even more than our previous house, because it's ours, and it feels like ours. We've really left our mark. I almost had imposter syndrome with the last house, even though it was this tiny bungalow. I just felt like, I don't want to break it. I don't want to ruin the history, but with this one, I own it. I'm like, yeah, I can paint the door. I can put a billion nails in the wall. It's fine. It's ours, and it feels like my family. So, this is my sitting room. The art here, the sailboat art, is one of the first things we bought for our home, and I absolutely love it. It's the first thing you see when you walk into the house. My husband surprised me with it for my first Mother's Day here in New Jersey, and I've never lived anywhere where it made sense to have giant sailboat art, so I think this is what really sealed the deal for me. Like, we're living here. We're coastal now. We are on the Jersey Shore, so I just love this piece. I also love the simple white frame. I feel like it really pops against all my darker woods and all my antique finds here. These chairs I actually had made when we were in Charlotte, North Carolina. When we lived in Charlotte, I was obsessed with green, and I still am. It's my favorite color, but I was really inspired by the trees and the lushness of North Carolina, so a lot of the pieces I got then were green. So, one of our favorite things about this house when we toured it was the fact that there was a wood-burning fireplace, so this was really my anchor for this room. I love the idea of being able to sit and converse and relax around this fireplace, so that's how I chose the layout for the room. I also always have Christmas on my mind, and I thought this is the perfect Christmas tree room, so I knew I was going to put my Christmas tree in that corner over there, so I just had these visions of having all my Christmas decor up and the Christmas tree with the wood-burning fireplace, so that really did inform the layout of the room and how I decorated as well. I wanted to make sure there was a good palette for my Christmas decorations, if I'm being honest. Yeah, but overall I loved the big windows. The bay window was really nice. I loved that there was this huge blank wall because I knew I could do something really powerful and impactful right off the bat with a large piece of art. I also love mixing textures to make things feel more casual, and like I said, I'm super inspired by where we live, by the ocean, so a lot of rattan, a jute rug, just a lot of natural elements, and I think it makes it very warm, very cozy, and very inviting. These three prints were found by my sister. She's still out in Evanston, Illinois, which is right outside of Chicago, and she is an avid thrifter like me, and we love estate sales, we love garage sales, we love it all, so she found these coastal prints, these ship prints from an estate sale, thought of me right away, and brought them here to me, so I love them. They're really special. I had the gold bamboo frames already from a previous project, and I just love the way it looks. I feel like it really leans into the coastal side, and of course I always think of my sister when I see them, so that makes me very happy. Learned while decorating this space how much I appreciate a home with soul, and that feels like you're looking into the owner's interests and likes and hobbies, so I really wanted to lean into my hobby of collecting and thrifting and decorating and making floral arrangements and garlands and such, so that was really what inspired me about this space, was I wanted to feel authentically ours from the moment you walk in, and it truly I feel like is the best representation of my style and really like my hobbies too. I love being creative. I love making things with my hands. I also love the holidays, and I find it to be my greatest motivator with creative projects. I also love using natural elements, so I created this whole mantle using hydrangeas from my front yard and magnolia leaves from my mother-in-law's yard, so I cut, me and my daughter actually cut all the hydrangeas. We hung them, we dried them, and then I created this piece, and I'm really proud of it because I love holiday decor, but I also don't like overconsumption. I don't like adhering strictly to trends. I want things to feel like they're sustainable and that I'm not just going to like get over it in a few years and buy a new version of the thing I already have, so using natural elements is great because you can do something new each year. It's cost effective, and I get to be extra creative. Last but not least, I do want to talk about my floors because it was one of the first big projects we did before moving into the house. The previous owners had gone with an extremely light, light wood. I really love homes that feel like soulful and warm and cozy, so I went darker, and I really love the effect. I think it just makes the house feel warmer and cozier, and I think it goes really well with my color palette, which is very nature-inspired, so I really like those warmer browns. This entryway moment I did here, it started with me knowing I wanted to showcase my beachcombing finds, so I was drifting in Maine with my sister, and we stumbled upon this printer's tray, and I knew it would be the perfect display for all of my little finds. It's funny. I look at my house, and I think of all of the objects I own, and what I love most are these natural pieces that I've found while beachcombing or out and about on nature walks with my daughter. I've attached a memory to each of these objects in this little printer tray that I can call back on when I look at it, so I really, really do love this display here. The burl wood table, it's faux burl, but I think it does the job. I bought it new, which is rare for me, and I love it. I love that not every wood tone in the room is the same. I think the dark flecks really make it work because it ties in with the other pieces of furniture, and this art here, I'm always thrifting frames. I just ignore whatever art's in it, and I get the object for the frame, but I have like a little hack I do where I collect old postcards, so these are both old postcards from Red Bank, New Jersey, which is right next to where we are now, and it just infuses a little bit more of our personality in the space. This little sand dollar here, so I'm really close with my nephew Everett. He is my best friend, and he visited from Chicago, and he was so excited to go beachcombing at the ocean, and he wanted to find sand dollars, and we were so happy when we found like four or five in one day, which I never find them, and they were pristine, so it was like very serendipitous, and I have this in my special display because I think of him every time I see it. I found this little table at the Salvation Army in North Carolina with my parents, actually, and I had all these big ideas that I was going to refinish it and switch out the hardware, and I thought, you know what? I think it works perfectly just as it is. It was like ten dollars. It's cute. It does the job. I store my daughter's little tiny shoes in there, so it's the perfect size, and I really like, you know, collecting shelves, as I've mentioned, so this is sort of a catch-all for random shelves I find, and of course, I have to have a picture of my daughter, June, who I love so much, but yeah, this is really nice because, you know, there's also a mirror, and I love tortoise bamboo. I also think that works really well with the darker woods and helps bring in the coastal elements. This I found at a thrift store in Vermont, possibly. I don't really remember, but I remember being really excited when I scored it. The house needed a little love. It definitely had the bones. It was cute. I love Cape Cod-style homes. I love the slanted ceilings in the upstairs. I love there's a little cute shed in the back, but overall, I feel like there were some more modern updates made to the house that didn't really fit my style. We had to redo everything, the siding, the front door, the flooring, pretty much everything, and there's still so many projects we want to do, but I'm thinking it's a long-term labor of love, so we're taking our time with it. Renovation that I love most about this house would probably be the exterior. I've never taken on a project like that, and it was so fun to look at different samples of siding and choose the door color and pick out all the plants for the front. I really was able to transform the exterior to something that felt more reflective of my style. When we bought it, everything was gray and pretty dilapidated, honestly, so to be able to infuse my personality and my husband's personality and what we wanted from a home and choose everything ourself was really special. Now, let me show you our open office. So, this is our office. It was formally a formal dining room, but for the sake of our family, my husband and I both work from home on occasion. I'm working from home two days a week, and he can one day a week, so it really didn't make sense for us to have a traditional dining space when what we really needed was flex workspace. So, we decided to try and make it fit in with the rest of the house so it didn't feel as harsh walking into an open room like this with an office. That's why I went with the large desk that almost feels dining table-esque and like a nice softer chair rather than a traditional computer chair, just to make it feel more intentional and part of the space. I chose this wallpaper because my husband is very much an old soul, and I felt like plaid really worked for his personality, and I wanted it to be neutral enough since we do have sight lines into this room from pretty much every room in the main floor. I wanted to make sure it wasn't too jarring or shocking, so I really liked that it was this soft, calm palette, which is great for a work environment. But like I said, the plaid, I don't know, just reminded me of my husband for some reason. The cabinets, this was a moment of function over design, I'd say. So, we store a ton of my daughter's toys in here. These are actually from Ikea, and they've worked great for us, so we need to be able to have my daughter access toys all over the house pretty much. So, it's nice to have a dedicated space where she can keep her crayons, her markers, her blocks, and all of that. So, even though it is an office, this is not filled with books or technology, it is filled with dolls and blocks. The transition from designing for just myself to myself and my husband, and now my daughter and baby, has definitely been a journey. Luckily, my husband and I have very similar styles in that he just likes whatever I do, and he lets me do whatever I want as long as things make sense and it's logical. He loves it. So, I definitely take that into consideration when getting prepared for children and sharing spaces with children. I just want things to feel neat and tidy and purposeful. So, I just make sure we have spots to stash things, and also that the toys and all the things and the objects my children play with are easily accessible for them. Like I said, I want this house to feel as much as theirs as it is ours. So, to make sure they have access to their things, they don't have to ask a parent to find a toy, and it's nice for all of us. But yeah, I feel like it was a natural progression. My husband is really helpful because he balances some of my more creative or out there ideas. He's definitely more grounded and practical. So, it's a very good collaboration, I would say. And as you can see, I have this empty curtain rod up here. This was not the intention. Of course, I wanted curtains in the office in time for this tour, but it doesn't always work out that way. And it's realistic, I think. Like, we're busy, we're expecting a child, we're working, and sometimes we just have to go with it. And right now, we're going with empty curtain rods. There were some renovation decisions we had to make right off the bat. Just logistically, it made the most sense to get the floors done and pick out the paint before we moved in. In hindsight, it would be nice to live with the house a little bit more before making those decisions, but I do love the floor. I love the wall colors, but I think I would have gotten a little more creative had I taken my time with it. So, I've sort of taken that mentality and applied it to the rest of my renovations. I'm taking my time, I'm living in the house, I'm feeling how the rooms work, how our family operates in them, and then sort of deciding our next steps. So, it wasn't like a rush to do everything at once, but more of a slow burn, and I really prefer it that way. So, our kitchen is actually an area that I'm not totally in love with. It is completely functional, which is great. It makes sense for our family, and I love the layout of having a more open concept back here just for our family purposes, but I do plan on making some little tweaks over time. I think I could add a little more character. Right now, it's a lot of builder-grade details, which I'd like to add some charm back in over time. So, on the list. The one change we did make in the kitchen was adding this polished nickel faucet. It definitely feels a little bit more higher-end than some of the other details in here, so I love that, and that makes me very happy, and it was a good starting point. My dream kitchen for this space would definitely feel a little bit more time-appropriate. I think I would like some beadboard and new counters to lighten things up a bit, and definitely some antique or antique-inspired hardware. We love cooking, and we use the kitchen all the time, honestly. I just want it to feel more homey and more like an extension of our living room, not just a builder-grade kitchen. So, adding some more personal touches and details to make it feel like the rest of the house would be great. And even though we have not done the updates to the kitchen yet, I'm very pleased with our eat-in kitchen situation with our dining room. So, we use this space as our primary dining area, and I love it because if you're in the kitchen cooking, you're not, like, pushed away in a corner of the house. You're open to your guests. You're open to your family, and the same with the den being right here. It's so great to be able to feel included while you're in the kitchen. My husband actually does most of the cooking, and he's a fabulous cook. So, he's mostly the one who's running the show over here, but as a diner, I love this space. I love the windows. My daughter is obsessed with birds and bird watching, so it's great that we have such a beautiful view of our backyard here. We love to put a feeder on the window in the spring and watch the birds come and eat and identify them together. So, this space is really great for everybody, honestly. One of the areas of the house that I especially loved when we toured was this long bench situation, a banquet, I guess you could call it. I love that it's cozy, and it can seat a lot of people, and it definitely just feels more casual than stiff dining chairs. My daughter likes to sit on here and look out the window, like I said, and I like to put a ton of pillows here, and I can change them out seasonally, and I just feel like it really amps up the cozy factor. We also added these battery-operated sconces. Wasn't in the budget to do hardwired at the time, so the battery-operated ones actually work great. I just have to remember to charge them every now and then, but it works for us, and I really love it. When it comes to setting the table, I always like to stick to a pretty, you know, nature-inspired color palette because it fits in with the rest of my house and we're very open here, but I really love just keeping it simple and keeping the arrangements low. To me, there's nothing more frustrating than when you're sitting across from someone and you have like this huge floral arrangement blocking you in discussion. So, to me, my biggest tip is keep it a little simple and low so people can converse, and also, you have to get the lighting right. That's why I added those battery-operated sconces. That's why I try and keep my light pretty low up here. To me, it's all about setting the mood and tone to be relaxing and cozy. So, yeah, the candles are very important, and I just like, yeah, like I said, nature-inspired. I love linens that feel casual, not too stuffy. I like plates that don't feel too stuffy. We're a family household, so this is what works best for us. This table is extremely sentimental to us as a family. It's actually my husband's childhood breakfast table that they had when he grew up in Fairhaven, and my mother-in-law gifted it to us and had it restained in any color we'd like. So, I chose this darker wood to coordinate with my other pieces of furniture, but it's so nice to imagine his family sitting around this table, and now my family gets to sit around this table. And once again, it's obviously a quality piece of furniture. It has stood the test of decades and decades of daily use. So, I love, love, love this table. This is our den space, and it definitely had the most improvement, I would say, from any other room in our house. I have always dreamed of having built-ins. I know it's weird, but I've like been obsessed with the idea of creating like a library-feeling den to like cuddle up and watch movies in. So, we decided now, you know, that I'm in nesting mode, that we would go ahead and do the project. So, we had lived in the space long enough to know what we needed, which is why I'm glad I took my time with it. Now that my daughter's older, the theme is always toys. We needed storage for toys, so we made sure we had nice, deep, tall cabinets for storage, and then plenty of shelves to show off my finds. I absolutely love the way it turned out. They custom-built the mantel, which was just a standard Home Depot, I imagine, mantel to begin with. The one area that we haven't updated yet that I'm looking forward to is retiling the fireplace, but I like to take things a little slow. I like to live with my designs and my choices for a little bit before going into another project. So, I'm going to live with it for a little bit and then make my tile decision, you know, hopefully in the next year or so. This piece here is an antique 1800s English pine console, and I bought it at a local store called British Cottage, which I love. To me, this was a big deal to purchase this because usually when I'm finding my antique finds or furniture, it's through like drifting and estate sales and garage sales, but this time I went into a store, I picked it out, and fell in love with it and brought it home that day. So, it was a very easy decision to make. I just love the kind of earthiness it brings to the room. I love that it has the age to it, and it's also a lighter wood, so it contrasts with some of our other pieces. I just think it really lightens the space, and it's one of my favorite pieces of furniture I've ever purchased. And then I love just foraging in my yard for foliage, because I think it looks brighter and more modern than a lot of like more formal floral arrangements. I like feeling like I have a piece of nature inside. I really am inspired by nature, and I love being amongst the trees, so I really love, you know, using a big branch just as a focal point. These lamps were actually these woven ginger lamps I saw online years ago. I bought them at our last house in Charlotte, and I just love them. I love the woven detailing. I love the dark colors. I just feel like they feel very warm and peaceful, so I love these lamps. And I also love the shape of like a ginger jar lamp. I think it's very chic, so I love them. This armchair I absolutely love. It is so cozy, and it has lived in my mother-in-law's house for years and years, and she actually gifted it us and gifted us a reupholstery job for it, which was so fun. We got to go to the drapery shop together, pick out the fabric, and she gifted it to us. And it is sentimental for that reason, and it's also so cozy, and it has stood the test of time because she has had it for decades. And now it lives with us for hopefully more decades to come. This room was certainly a design challenge, mainly because the roofline, it is, I wanted it to feel like a cozy space, but sometimes when your ceilings are very tall, it feels almost too open and exposed to feel warm and cozy. So I think the built-ins really helped me create this little feeling of a nook, and I feel like it warmed up the space and just made it feel much more custom and intentional, and it was just such a better use of space. I was really puzzled by how to lay out my furniture before we did the built-ins. It was like an aha moment once they were complete. This couch was a really exciting project for me. There was a local interior design shop called Salt Interiors that did custom furniture, and honestly, when I compared the price to some of the big box stores, it was along the same price as buying a couch new from any of the major retailers. So I got to pick out the style of the couch and the fabric, and I was so fun. It made me, I felt like such a designer, like I brought in all these fabric samples and my paint samples, and I laid them all out, and I went with this almost like flax color because I knew I wanted something bright and airy and coastal feeling, but I also wanted it to be functional for my daughter and our family because we make messes, so bright white just does not work. But this, the fact that the fabric has so much dimension to it, it's really easy to clean and keep clean and kind of hide any imperfections. So I love this couch. It's so cozy, and it's like super deep, so it's great for watching movies. And when it came to styling the built-ins, it was very easy for me because I have thrifted many objects over the years, and so has my family. So my dad found this adorable little sailboat at Salvation Army and gifted it to me. I have, over the years, I found this coral at a Salvation Army in Chicago, of all places. So I had really stockpiled some goodies, and I was so excited to put them all on display. I also, you know, like to collect frames and vintage postcards and vintage greeting cards, and I use that as art, as a more cost-effective way of styling. So that has been great. I found this piece of old coral at an antique store. Yeah, so like it almost feels like every object here has a story, and most of them were thrifted, but they have so much meaning because I think of my dad being out thrifting and thinking of me when he sees this cute little sailboat. So I really think of my family and how we love thrifting and hunting for objects when I look at my little shelf display. My favorite feature of this home when we bought it was definitely the upstairs. It feels like a secret hideaway compared to the downstairs, and I've solely dedicated it to my children. I love the slanted ceilings. It kind of has this cozy escape feeling, like it's their special hideaway. I want this house to feel as much theirs as it is ours, and I love that, you know, we don't have a ton of space here, but I've dedicated such a big chunk to my children because it's so important for me to feel like they have ownership of this house as well because they're going to grow here. They're going to learn here, so I really love everything about the upstairs. I think it is a special space for them. This is our bedroom. It's a little unconventional as it is on the first floor, and I remember thinking that was an interesting choice when we toured the house, but we work with it, and one thing I had to keep in mind when designing the space is I wanted it to feel separate from the other areas of the house. I wanted it to feel private and like an oasis, so I went with a much lighter and brighter color palette to promote relaxation and rest, obviously, but also I went with blues, which I don't normally decorate with too much because, like I said, I wanted to differentiate it from the rest of the house as our space, so the bed I bought at a consignment shop in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the bedding I've had for years now. The bed skirt is from Ballard Designs a few years ago, and we actually have one of those beds that's remote-controlled that you can move up and down, so the bed skirt actually like somehow detached and got lost in the world on the other side, so we just showed this side, but it's very functional. It's very cozy. I just wanted a very peaceful space. The end tables were a Marketplace find, Facebook Marketplace. I think they were like $25 for two of them, and I also had big dreams and plans to refinish them, which I have not done yet, but I don't mind them. They're just a little orange right now, but they do the job, and they're very heavy-duty, real wood, solid pieces, which I always look out for when I'm buying secondhand. And then over here, this is my little getting ready corner, and it's one of my favorite corners of the house. I got this antique pine vanity from a local shop that I've mentioned a few times now, British Cottage. I love their inventory. I loved the feminine details. I love that all of my things have a very unique vessel to display them in. It just feels so me, and I just love getting ready here. I look forward to getting ready in the mornings because I have this beautiful space to, you know, spend my time on myself before my daughter gets up. So I love this vanity. I'm a big queen of thrifting random vessels, and they really come in handy when styling my vanity. I have, like, a little vessel for everything. Okay, one of my best tips for thrifting is to not don't buy just to buy. It can be enticing when there's so much to sift through. For me, I think, like, what would I buy full price? Would I buy this item full price? Would I buy it for $25 instead of $2? And if the answer is yes, then it's a great find and take it. I also look for items, like, I usually go into thrifting with this mindset of I can define my personal style in three words. So I like to say it's eclectic and coastal and warm, let's say. I then use those words to dictate what I buy because it is very easy to get carried away in the thrill of the hunt, but you really want to make sure you're not buying just to buy. We don't want to add more waste. We want it to be intentional and feel like it's a fit for your home. So I definitely look for things that are cohesive with the rest of my style. And lastly, it's kind of Marie Kondo, but does it spark joy? And if I see something, like, I remember finding this cute little vase. It sparked so much joy, and I thought of all the different ways I could use it. Then it's definitely a home run, and you should buy it. But I try and be selective. I very rarely will do, like, a huge thrift haul. I mostly am going for very intentional objects. And then I also will give our own items back to thrift stores when we're done using them. I've given children's clothes. I've given my clothes. I've given random things that I've collected over the years. So it's always good to give back as well. Okay, this dresser area is the first thing you see when you walk into the room. So I really wanted it to be a moment. We had this large wall with little to do with it. So one of my favorite purchases for the whole house, which was also one of my biggest investments, was this dresser. We bought it new from Serena and Lily. I love the color. I love the texture. I love the knobs. I just think it is coastal and bright and feels really high quality. So this was a new buy for me, and it is definitely worth every penny as we use it daily. This seashell is one of my favorite finds of all time. I got it from a flea market in Lambertville, New Jersey. We did, like, a little staycation in New Jersey, my husband and I. And on our way home, we stopped at this flea market, and I saw this huge shell wood sculpture, and I fell in love. I was wearing, at the time, overalls, but they have seashells all over them. So it felt like it was meant to be, and I am obsessed with this. I don't know what to do with it. I fill it with random shells, but I'm sure I'll find a real purpose for it soon. And then these lamps were another Facebook marketplace find just a few blocks away. And then the art is just art I've collected over the years. Some are prints that I've bought new. Most are, you know, thrifted, thrifted, thrifted frame. So I like to mix the old with the new. So I will buy new prints and match them with thrifted frames, just to freshen things up a bit. Overall, I think this is just a great focal point for the bedroom. I started my TikTok and content creation, I think, out of a place of fear and anxiety, honestly. Like I said, this was a major purchase for us, and I felt like I needed motivation to continue decorating and tackling projects. I was, you know, a new mom, and in a town I've never lived in, and I was feeling like I needed something to work towards every day and a creative outlet. And I've met such a great community of people in similar, older, smaller homes with a lot of projects to be done. And it's comforting to me to feel like there's a community out there that relates to not only home design, but the way in which we design our homes, which is through thrifting and secondhand finds. That has been a huge creative outlet for me to feel like I can express my love of thrifting and secondhand finds and antiques. So this is our upstairs. Clearly, we have a child gate, and that is for safety. The one thing with old homes is there's a lot of time narrow, steep stairs, and we definitely have that. So we have gates to protect our children. This light fixture is, was actually my grandma's, and I have such fond memories of her house growing up. It was very eclectic. It was filled with antiques and beautiful, beautiful art she painted. So this reminds me of her house, and I have like the fondest childhood memories of creating at her house. We used to paint and color, and I just, I feel like so much of my style is inspired by her. Right behind me, let's go into my daughter's room. My daughter's room is definitely one of my favorite spaces I've decorated. I love decorating children's spaces. I feel like you have an opportunity to really get creative and sort of throw the rules of design out the window, and it's just freeing to me. And I also love, I truly believe my love language is creating a space for her to grow and learn and foster creativity. So I try and do that by incorporating a lot of color and her favorite things wherever she looks. So the first thing I picked out for this room was this wallpaper. It's by Sanderson, and it's called Woodland Chorus. I am in love with it. I think it's a work of art, and my daughter and I love going on nature walks. We love bird watching. We like watching insects, and it just reminded me of her and her vibe. So we love it. We play I Spy with it when we're hanging out in here. So I just love seeing her cherish this wallpaper that I picked out because I thought it really embodied her spirit. So I love this wallpaper. From there, I wanted it to be a little fun and bright and youthful. So I added this stripe play couch from House of Noah. This is great because she can take it apart and build forts with it, and it's just like super cozy. All the pieces come apart. She can jump on it. She can get rough and tumble. We can turn it into a bed. So it's very functional for her space. It's almost like her own little apartment, like studio apartment. She has a living room. And then this quilt is one of my favorite, favorite thrift finds of all time. I have a thrift store in town in an old building called St. Agnes Thrift Shop, and I found that quilt, and it reminded me of my daughter instantly. So I knew I had to add that to the space. And overall, I just try to incorporate her knickknacks, her toys. I want it to not feel perfect. I just want it to feel like it represents her. I want it to feel like she had a say in this design. So I don't go super polished with my kids' spaces. I really go for authenticity and functionality over everything. When we toured the house, these built-ins caught my attention immediately. I thought they were so charming, and I thought they really made this room feel cozy and intentional. The drawers don't really open all the way. That's the one catch with them. They're quirky. You really have to pull. So I will have to have someone help me fix those so my daughter has better accessibility here. But from a visual standpoint, I absolutely love the built-ins. I love styling them with her toys. She's obsessed with Dr. Seuss, so I had to throw in a Dr. Seuss book. She loves coloring. These are just things that remind me of her. And she's free reign to move things and play with them. And she's pretty good about putting stuff back, too. So it stays pretty tidy in here, actually. This bed, honestly, this is kind of where I infused my own ideas here. I always wanted a canopy bed growing up. I thought they were the coolest thing ever. So when I had the opportunity to get my daughter a big girl bed, I knew it had to be a canopy bed. I love, and it is a little unconventional that the bed is in this corner here, but I really wanted her to feel like she had a cozy nook to relax in. And it definitely feels like a cozy little nook. It's a hideaway from the rest of the room and the rest of the house, and it's her safe space. So I love watching her on her monitor. She'll just be laying in her bed reading books at night, and I could just see that she's gaining more independence through this space. Everything is easy for her to get in and out of, easy for her to reach. Everything is low. I feel like I look like a giant in here, but that's by design. I wanted her to feel empowered to make her own decisions in here and not need a parent to hold her hand and get her things. So I think she really likes it. This little rocking chair was actually taken from my mother-in-law's house. She had it for her kids when they were growing up, and she thought my daughter would love it, and she does. She really rocks and rolls in this thing, and I just find it to be so cute, so sweet, and also sentimental. And I love any chance we have to incorporate elements from our own childhoods into our modern house design, and I love that I'll be able to pass it on to my daughter as well. I'd say my style is very collected, a little bit eclectic, and always warm. I love collecting things. My whole family are collectors. We've thrifted my whole life. Now thrifting is really having a moment, which is great because I've been practicing my whole life for this, and it's cool to buy secondhand, and I think that is evident in my style. Things are, you know, found over time and bought with intention. It's not just let me fill a cart online and fill my house with stuff that will go in a landfill. Right opposite my daughter's room is her playroom. This, once again, was one of the reasons I fell in love with this house. The fact that the upstairs could be completely transformed for kids and have no trace of adults, and I love it. I think it gives her the freedom of expression, the freedom of play. Similar to her room, I tried to make everything accessible to her so everything is lower. So we have these dressers or these storage pieces from Ikea. Just from a functionality standpoint, they're great. She knows where to put her toys. She just can put things away by herself. She can get things by herself. It also lends itself to be a great play surface. We also wanted to incorporate a ton of color because I find that colorful spaces are very inspiring, and I promote creativity and all of that. So I loved this rug from Annie Souk, and I love the way it plays off of the light, light blue of our walls. These clouds were actually decals I bought from Etsy, and I think they look like painted almost. I think they're really nice, and I just was looking to add charm and a little bit of eclecticness wherever I could. Yeah, so I just wanted it to feel like her special rainbow room where she can do whatever she wants. The chairs and the table I also love with the little heart cutouts. I do themed book displays based on what holiday is coming up. So we have Thanksgiving, so we go to the library, and together we pick out books that match our theme, and we put them on display for the month. So it's great because we get to talk about holidays together, and it's easy to pick a book to talk, you know, that's relevant to what's going on right now. Being a mom to June has completely changed my life. I love her spirit. I love spending time with her. I love watching her grow. She's such a creative old soul. She really does feel older than the three years that she just turned. She's just, I just love spending time with her and spending time with her. It doesn't feel hard or stressful or like work. It feels like fun. It feels like I'm hanging out with my little friend who we have so much in common. So it's really been such a blessing, honestly, to be able to be home with her a few days a week and just have our days together without anything else to worry about. I feel like we're really building strong bonds through being home and exploring the world of Fairhaven together. This hand-painted armoire was a curb score. It was being brought to the curb a few houses down from ours, and I was walking home from actually being in the community garden with my daughter, oddly enough, and the scene depicts little bunnies at a garden. And I saw them carrying this out, and I said, is this for the trash or the curb pickup? And they're like, you can have it. We love for it to go to a family. We don't know what to do with it. So I called my husband and he hauled it home, and it lives in her playroom now. I actually made it kind of like a grocery store inside for her to play with. It looks a little crazy right now, but we put fake vegetables and milk and we pretend it's a grocery store, which is really fun. Yeah, but I love this piece. And it actually turns out that one of my daughter's babysitters, this is from her childhood home. And we had no idea, and we put it together. So it's really sentimental, really special. And it's really nice to have a piece of the local community, a local family in our home. When thrifting and when looking for furniture and decor for my home, I feel like I'm firstly inspired by my environment. I was so inspired by living in a coastal region. I'm right by the ocean, which I've never experienced before. So I really loved that. I love nature. I love being in the outdoors. So I was really searching for things that felt coastal, more natural fabrics, natural materials. I have like a lot of rattan and jute and baskets. And I love beach combing and shelling. So I had to make sure I had furniture that could show my most prized possessions, which is my coral and my seashells and all of the things I find when I'm out hunting on the beach. So I'm definitely inspired by my environment. And then secondly, I'm inspired by how my family will function here. So like I said, the upstairs is for the kids. It's for my daughter and it's for my toddler or for my newborn. It doesn't have to be perfect. It can get messy up there. It can get a little hectic. So for me, I just wanted it to be inspiring, a place to be creative and a place to grow. And then for my husband, he has a long commute. He works a lot. I wanted him to feel like he had a retreat to relax to. So I really looked at comforting, cozy accents that would make him feel at ease. And for myself, it's just the whole house is reflective of me and my style. And I love creating. I love making. I like making flower arrangements. I like decorating for the holidays. So I feel like every room has my mark on it. Right off the playroom is our baby boy's nursery. I'm due in just a short few months. So we were very excited to decorate this space. What I love most is that we were able to use a lot of what my daughter had in her previous room. So I didn't feel like we had to buy all new furniture and new wallpaper, new rugs. I kept it really gender neutral with my daughter's space for her nursery. And I was very easily able to flip it for a little boy, which is great because we don't know him yet. We didn't really have anything to go off of on what his interests will be. So I really just went for overall childhood nostalgia as the look and feel of the space. I looked at things that are important to me and to my husband and what we loved about childhood. And I tried to incorporate it into the design. So no baby really needs a roll-top desk. But this was a garage sale find. And I remember at my grandparents' house, they had a little secretary desk, a wood one similar to this, that I would play at and color at. And to me when I saw this, it reminded me of my grandparents' house. And I was like, this baby needs his little roll-top desk. So I don't know what he'll put in there. Right now it's empty. This lamp, I come from a huge baseball family. We love baseball and so does my husband. This is his lamp from when he was a little boy. So I love the hand-painted lampshade and of course the baseballs. It's just cute. And it's something both of our families have in common. My dad thrifted this book for him, The Little Engine That Could. He is amazing at finding beautiful old books. And this is like a treasure to me. I love this book. And I had it on display in my daughter's room. And now it will be this little boy's. My sister also thrifted me this sailboat art. So it really is like a community thing to thrift and gift each other our thrift finds. So I thought it went perfectly with the wallpaper. And I just, I love it because it reminds me of her. Up here on the baseball note, my husband on our wedding day, we had a baseball and our guests passed it around and they signed it as if it was like a professional baseball player's autograph. So I thought it would be really cute to have on display in our little boy's room. It's okay if he doesn't like baseball, but it is strongly encouraged clearly. And then lastly, my dad also thrifted this beautiful little bear for my daughter. And I'm now reusing it for the baby's room because it is so sweet. This little cubby I found on Facebook Marketplace. It's originally from Pottery Barn and made to look old, but I think it has such a fun effect. I love the little nooks. It almost feels like a museum of toys and so many of these pieces my daughter used to play with when she was really young. So having them on display just makes them feel that much more special. I have little sailboats that my sister, once again, thrifted for me. I have old blocks that my dad, once again, thrifted for me that I reused to create his name, which will be John. And yeah, just everything in here, I have a memory attached to it. So I'm excited to share it with my little boy, my dad. He has like so many random knickknacks and this little big bird I thought was really cute, so I took it from him. He wasn't really gifted, but I don't think he needed it anyway. And this chair, the recliner here, I got this from Facebook Marketplace in town. It was kind of neat to see the cycle this woman was phasing out of having babies. She had three running around when I went and picked it up. So it was kind of cool to see this take on another life and now I'll be, you know, rocking my child to sleep on the same chair that this woman who lives a few blocks away used for years and years. So that's really important to me. This quilt was another St. Agnes thrift shop find. I love quilts and I love thrifting quilts. I give them a very good wash and I just thought the colors played beautifully with the yellows and blues of the wallpaper. So I love this quilt. This dresser I found at a local church sale. It was sort of like a flea market. It happens annually in our town. I was there with my mother-in-law. I saw it and it automatically reminded me of Fairhaven where we live. I think it's more leaning towards like a different community, maybe Maine or something, but it reminded me of Fairhaven because we have the ocean nearby and all the little cute houses and I saw it and I fell in love with it. So we took it home that day. I got a really good deal on it and it's just precious to me. I think it adds a nice handmade feeling to the room and I really, really love it. I also collect picnic baskets and they have come in handy, surprisingly, with kids. I store toys in them. I store just random doodads. Whenever you need to just like quickly hide things if you're having company over, the picnic baskets come in handy and I feel like they're just so cute and they add a little character to the space. This fishing lure I just bought two weeks ago. My sister bought it for me and this little boy. We were in the Florida Keys with my family and a local Florida Keys artist make these and I thought because there's such a strong fishing culture here that it would be nice to add to my son's room to introduce him to fishing. This little corner here I just thought was a little boring so I went on Etsy and I found Tootles Decal Studio who also did the clouds that I used elsewhere in the playroom. I fell in love with this little village scene. I thought it would be fun to use as a backdrop when my daughter plays with dolls or toys. I just, something about it just felt so charming and nostalgic to me. So they're decals, they're removable. I did them myself in like five minutes probably and I highly recommend if you're designing a kid's space that needs to grow with your children instead of investing in something permanent. It's really smart to do something removable because yeah they'll probably outgrow the clouds in this cute little village sadly but I will be able to easily pivot and update this room based on their needs as they grow. In this season of my life I think this home like I said it's to me it's just a privilege to have a home honestly. It feels like I get so caught up in the details with decorating and perfection and at the end of the day I am the happiest I've been within this house but not because of those reasons but because I'm with my daughter I have the flexibility to work part-time now so we play here, we make art here, we make meals here. Right now I feel like I'll have the fondest memories of those days with my daughter here you know whether it's in the kitchen or in the play room making a mess. Right now it's really about my time to bond with my children. Word home means everything to me honestly. I feel like I have dreamt of home ownership my whole life. I've dreamt of a safe space where I could create and be myself and it's exactly what I want to give my daughter and my son as well. Home is really at its core it's not about the decor it's not about having perfectly curated mantles even though I like that too. It's mostly about feeling safe at ease and inspired and I want my family to feel that at home in togetherness of course and I think our layout of our house really promotes togetherness and that's something I love. Thanks for watching be sure to go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content shopping guides and so much more.