Here's the post in which I turn a literal and finite event into an overarching metaphor for life. Yeehaw.   This past week I was driving with my family from Northern Michigan back to our home downstate. Plenty of feet of snow were already on the ground (it being Fargo and all) and at the moment of our departure it started snowing with a real sense of determination. Thick, wet flakes swirled in every direction, ...

I can't tell you what this family home looked like before Rob Stuart Interiors entered the picture, only that his involvement had to have monumentally transformed the space. Rob did it all: from retaining the integrity and overall turn of the century feel of the home, to adding fresh colors and patterns, and, let's not forget, the ingenious new-y0rk-city-space-constraints solutions sprinkled throughout. I'd like to move in and I do mean that. An entryway to start off ...

Talking about things in their opposites can be oddly very effective (as was proven with this big time hit), and so we're discussing the ways in which you're proactively Un-Live-Simply-ing your life, as a way, of course, to encourage you in the other direction. Here, then, are the ways you are actively making your space feel smaller, darker, and dirtier than is at all necessary. 1. You're not living within your spatial means.   While ...

I can't tell you how many times I see very cluttered office spaces that have come as a result of ill-suited desks. Common mis-matches include: - Desks without storage + people who are of the out-of-sight-out-of-mind orientation. - Desks with storage + people who are habitual space-fillers. - Desks with storage + people that aren't clutter-prone and don't have a ton of stuff, but feel anxiety about not utilizing available space. - Desks with storage ...

There's a fine line between being kind and being a jerk. Most of us seem to live in a state of constant paranoia about verging over to jerk-dome--or, more accurately, about appearing to others as though we've made the cross over. To counteract this, our tendency is to err on the side of caution; we are all too apt to overshare, over-explain, to waste breath and energy when Simple responses like "yes" and "no" and ...