About Kathleen

I'm Kathleen and I am thrilled you found me.

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There's no where I'd rather be than home.  Our house in Oakland, California is like a big laboratory for me.  I really love making our rooms shine on a shoestring budget.

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Everyone says that they realized their passion as a kid and that is true with me, too.  I spent hours arranging my little bedroom, drawing up floor plans on graph paper, talking my mom into sewing sheets into curtains. Each morning, I arranged a grosgrain ribbon on a teddy bear over my bedspread.  I'm not kidding. I'm pictured right here.  (my bedroom, 2).

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I still love getting "the look" for little money (thus preserving my shoestring budget) but I hope my taste has evolved since those ribbon days.

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When I was a single, 26 year old high school teacher in Portland, Oregon, I bought my first house directly from an elderly widow who thought a single woman couldn't get a bank loan.  We wrote out the agreement on a piece of 3-hole notebook paper, contingent on the fact that a bank would loan me the money.  As a proud homeowner, I took to doing up the rooms like nobody's business.  Money was tight so creativity was a necessity. (remodeled kitchen, 3)

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A few years later, I got married.

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Together, P and I bought three more houses - a 1920's Portland Foursquare (remodeled kitchen 4), a 1970's California ranch (bedroom, 5) and our current house, a 1990's contemporary in Oakland, California (photos are in my blog articles).  So far, this has been quite an adventure.  I fell in love with each house while remodeling.   Eventually, we sold and moved on to the next house project, only to fall in love all over again.  All the remodeling was done on a very limited budget and part of our success in quickly selling was due to what is now called "staging" the rooms.  Only, we hadn't staged a thing because that was the way we were already living.

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That got me thinking.  Ever notice how some people get their houses "ready to sell?"  We all really know what it takes to make a house "sing" and I wonder, why can't we live that way before we sell our houses?  Shouldn't we want to make our rooms the very best they can be?

 

Here's to falling in love all over again.

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PS. I want you to meet my little muse, gWitster.  He might look like a cartoon character but he leads me to the best design and great deals.  Please check him out on my home page!