The Case for Refreshing Your Home Without Spending a Cent

On Changing a Room to Change Your Mind

Small shifts do more than rearrange a space—they rearrange us. This isn’t about energy or aesthetics. It’s about movement. A shift, even a small one, has a way of loosening what’s been stagnant. You clear a surface, move a chair, adjust a lamp, and suddenly, the room—your mind—feels lighter.

Last week, I opened submissions for a new House Call series: Rooms of Our Own. It’s about noticing where you feel most at home. A way to move past aesthetics, past the curated and controlled, and into something deeper—longing, memory, the unspoken reasons we arrange our lives the way we do.

Creativity lives there, in that space between what we want and what we have. It’s why so many of us feel a surge of energy when we take on a home project. Not just the end result, but the process itself—our hands moving, our minds engaged, and the quiet satisfaction of seeing something through. The inevitable realization that this “quick update” will, in fact, lead to three more projects you hadn’t planned for.

But have you ever stopped to ask why? Why are we driven to do more than just live within the walls of our homes? Why do we like what we like? Why do certain colors, shapes, and materials pull us in while others don’t? Our sense of style isn’t random. It comes from the way our grandmother’s kitchen smelled, the cool of a tiled floor in summer, the wallpaper we swore we hated but now find weirdly charming.

Whether we realize it or not, it’s built from experiences, emotions, and the stories we carry.

So we’re starting where my love for spaces began: working with what you’ve got. These projects take a day, a few hours, five minutes. They cost nothing. But they change the way you see a space, the way you move through it.

We’ll discuss:

1. Why small shifts in your home can change how you feel about your home.

2. How to see your space with fresh eyes—without buying anything new.

3. 12 Simple, free ways to refresh your home.

4. What Rooms of Our Own is and how to share your space.