Meghan Evans

Writing the first blog post for this site is intimidating. Where do I begin? What’s worthy of this spot on the blog? But, if I’m going to start this thing, I have to start somewhere. So here we are.

Starting with the house hunt and purchase seems to make the most sense to me because I intend for this blog to mostly be about home and design. Though, I’m sure I’ll throw in some life and style content into the mix because that’s my other passion and day job.

I moved to DC and in with my husband in 2015 when we got married. He had a beautiful new-build condo downtown close to his work, restaurants, metro, and museums. It was a great place to land. But, he’d been living there a little while and it was furnished and felt like his. I moved a single piece of furniture into the condo – a teal velvet accent chair. I was pretty pleased with how well it went with the hand-painted grandfather clock he inherited. Over the next seven years, I made small tweaks here and there, but never really invested in the condo because I knew it wasn’t our forever house. I regret that. Make a place – no matter how temporary – your own. Hang art, paint, buy a rug. Do whatever you’re able given the space and where you are.

I was eager, from the very beginning, to buy a single family home and we finally did so in June 2021. When house hunting, my husband wanted an updated home that was move-in ready. For the most part, that was simply not available within our budget and location parameters. I also really wanted to do the updating myself. I felt like flippers totally gutted the old houses leaving no charm and homeowner updated houses weren’t meeting our requirements overall. I considered total gut jobs, but those got snapped up too quickly. The home we ended up purchasing required some updating. But, the location was perfect.

Immediately upon buying, we started contacting contractors about renovating. I wanted to work with a design/build firm because I was so inexperienced with renovations. We interviewed about six firms before deciding on who to hire. From there, we worked through many, many iterations of the spaces to be renovated: kitchen, hall bath, primary bath. In June 2023 we started construction and are wrapping up as we speak.

I’m hoping to share a bit about the renovation process (now, after the fact) plus my design journey in real time. Hope you’ll follow along and find some inspiration in the process.