As an editor at Design Milk, I?ve been writing about design for 7+ years. You would think that after all that time ? learning about design, meeting designers from all over the world, interviewing with heads of design ? that I would have some semblance of experience when it came to designing my own living room. Nope. If anything, this experience has humbled me and taught me that being exposed to such a high bar of design is both a blessing and a curse. Over the course of my career, I had been acquiring the proverbial champagne taste but as a millennial, first-time homebuyer, I was on that beer budget ? and it wasn?t even the cool craft beer kind.
A series of fortunate events led my husband and I to buy our first family home in May 2020, during the early months of the pandemic and in a circumstance that?s hard to replicate in the market now. We competed with just one other buyer with a below asking price (that was not all cash) and all contingencies still in place. Ours is a unicorn story and I feel for all my fellow millennials (and any first-time homebuyer) still looking to buy a home now. We were very lucky and privileged to be able to find this home and have a space to weather through all the lockdowns and mandates during the past two years. The day we closed on our first home!
Because we bought during a very uncertain period of the pandemic, we moved in quickly with very little thought to decor or design. Our first priority was survival. Shelter-in-place orders meant w...