81. Sprucing Up Your Space (Without Busting Your Budget)

I don't think we've ever really lived in a space that we liked a lot. Actually, one of the scariest parts of this experience was early on you actually probably have to get rid of everything. That was tougher for my psychology. Had I started out with that, I wouldn't have done anything. A lot of Ikea furniture, a lot of low quality items, a lot of messiness. Where do the shoes pile up? Where do we constantly have clutter?

Take stock of the areas you spend no time. You see a space, you feel it, just calm your nervous system. We loved it so much that we left it on as we slept. I'm not going to go balls to the wall in terms of how much I spend on this. How much did we spend? I actually don't know if I even know. You get more juice out of the space. We also had one decision maker. That gave me a lot of anxiety. That's the craziest part.

Welcome back to the Shit You Don't Learn in School podcast. This is Calvin Roser. And this is Steph Smith. And today we're going to be talking about sprucing up your space. Cal, you just did a big pivot and then pivot back. What the heck is a big pivot? Between being Calvin and Calvin. Okay. Well, that's a small pivot for me because I'm a madman. But anyways.

You do go all in on your projects. And I think we're going to be talking about that today in the realm of our home. Yes. Yes. What are we talking about today?

So I like to say you did a home remodel. You think that's too extreme of a description. But basically, we have been living in our current place for around a year and a half. Even prior to that, a lot of the furniture we brought to San Francisco was the same. So we've been living with the same situation, a lot of IKEA furniture, a lot of kind of low quality items, a lot of messiness.

mostly on my behalf. But we came back from Japan and you decided it was time. It was time for an upgrade. And you basically redid certainly our living area, our kitchen, other kind of... smart home hacks around the house. And so I thought you should share this information. I think you did a really good job. And I think we're just going to walk through those learnings.

Yeah. Now that we've gotten some compliments on the space, I think it's okay to claim that we did something good here, but we're in an apartment. We didn't do a home remodel, but in our living room, our main room, we changed out. literally everything within that space over the course of a month. And that was certainly not the intention, but I would characterize it more as like we made the space more livable, aesthetically pleasing.

And just overall enjoyable to be in. There's something of taking that aesthetic of Japan where you see a space, you walk into it, you feel it just calm your nervous system. And we have a lot more of that going on than what we did before. And it's actually really exciting how that can come together. Yes. And I want to talk about that visual aesthetic, but also I think.

What I've been more impressed with is what you said. It's more livable. And that was with certain decisions of how a room's oriented and simple things like pull out drawers in your cabinets. There's just certain things that have made. living in this space much better. For sure. Okay. So before we go into what you actually did and maybe some tactics and lessons, I actually just want to start with this approach that both of us have had to life, which is just...

So long-term frugality, I think for a long time, especially since we were nomads, we didn't want to invest in furniture because we didn't know how long we would be using it for, which meant for a long time. basically all of our furniture was ikea furniture and this is no shade to ikea i love that place but it didn't all really fit together and it was on the lower quality end

Yeah, I wouldn't even characterize this as a frugality thing, but I think there was a transition for us that took us longer because we were nomads. Basically, we went from living out of Airbnbs to moving into an apartment in Southern California, and all we had was a backpack.

And then little by little, we kind of filled that place with things without knowing how long we're going to be there, whether we're going to go nomadic again. And so we're sort of hesitant to invest in anything that you might consider expensive. And then we moved to San Francisco.

we like the place and we're like oh maybe we want to be here longer term and if we're going to be here we might as well make it enjoyable because at least for me i had a pretty long-term frustration that it became messy too easily And I think that's a trap that people with small places will fall into. But thankfully, it's actually a solvable problem. I didn't know that before. I thought you might have to actually get a bigger space.

And then there was the other thing of like, I found myself wanting to host people over for dinner and I didn't feel proud of the space. And I felt like the hosting environment was pretty suboptimal. So no matter how hard I tried, it was always like a six out of 10 experience.

And with a few upgrades, it would both be more fun for me, but also for the other people who joined. And that was kind of the motivation behind actually doing something about that. Yeah. And for those listening who might be like, okay, so you went from Ikea Furniture.

and you upgraded it, is this episode going to all be about super expensive choices and spending tens of thousands of dollars on an upgrade? Maybe just to give people a sense of numbers, how much did we spend? I actually don't know if I even know. Well, I think you could say we spent somewhere in the.

domain of $10,000 on what we're going to talk about today. And then we did some other things that might've been a few more thousand dollars in terms of detoxifying the home, which we're going to talk about on another podcast episode. But yeah, I would say we spent about 10 grand in terms of.

sprucing the place up which some people spend on one rug those people have that's what i'm saying a lot of money though that's what i didn't want people to think that we're spending you know some people spend 10 000 on one couch on one rug that was not the kind of

remodel or upgrade that we're talking about here. So I think actually a lot of the things that we'll dive into are very applicable. I mean, certainly not if you're only on, let's say, an IKEA budget, but it is, I think, a nice in-between because...

When we even started looking at furniture, it did sometimes feel like you've got the Ikea budget and then you've got something that was like 50x that. There was kind of a lack of the messy middle. Yeah. And I would also say that in this whole process, there's somewhat of a skill being acquired, which is how do you create a space that you enjoy? And I think the relevance for anyone who's listening is like,

okay, if you only have a couple thousand dollars or even a couple hundred dollars to like spruce up your space, that's fine. But there still is this fundamental skill gap that I didn't have that was developed at least through this period. And now actually some of the friends who have visited are like,

hey, do you have thoughts on this thing I'm thinking about doing in my home? And it made me realize that even a lot of my friends who own their own places, they don't have that skill because it's easy to kind of go from your 20s to your 30s and carry over the random stuff that you accumulated along the way. without actually taking the time to be like, I'm going to get rid of this stuff and create something for the new me. Yeah. And this is.

The same concept where people say you can't really learn unless you unlearn. I think there was a similar process where at the beginning we had to kind of start from scratch. So maybe we can start there. So again. coming into this we had a bunch of disparate items you were even selling things on facebook marketplace in the past we were very oriented around

cost. And then that amounted to a bunch of disjointed items that didn't really fit together. So what did we do next? well the first thing is we came back from japan and i was like our place feels messy so i was like let's try to declutter i asked you to help out in this process and i think you too were inspired to get rid of things after being in japan

which historically hasn't been true. And that's important in our apartment because it's small and it kept getting messy in a sense because we didn't really have the space. So the first thing is we just got rid of some things. Spring cleaning. I don't know if I have tips other than don't be too wetted to your stuff. You can always replace it at some point if you don't need it. But generally, I like the idea if you haven't used something for a year.

It's probably okay to get rid of it unless it's this niche item that you need in case of the apocalypse and you want to keep that around. Like my yellow rollerblades? Oh, yeah. I mean, the yellow rollerblades is a great example of something you bought because it was cute. And I think I propose that we get rid of it.

maybe 10 times, and finally you're ready to get rid of them. So we made some easy decisions like that. And I think the important thing actually is when I started decluttering, the idea wasn't to then go about and change our physical space. It was this very iterative process that started with this idea that I want a cleaner space, but then it slowly snowballed into something else as I kind of got a little crazy and obsessed with this project.

Yes, which I think I already mentioned, this project only took a month. So I know a lot of home optimizations or changes can take months and years. In this case, it was very, very siloed.

Once you got into it, you're like, I want to just do it all now. And I think that was also really helpful. For sure. And then step two for me is we actually bought, I think of that $10,000 we spent, we spent about. $1,000 in Japan just buying kitchen stuff like cute ceramic bowls. We bought a nice Japanese knife, things like that that we brought home. And that was a part of what I think was a big motivation for me, which is I wanted my cooking and hosting experience.

experience to be a lot better. So if there was an entry point for me, it was actually, I want to have a better experience as I'm cooking things for both us and other people. So a lot of the early stuff focused on sort of kitchen. And as I added more things, I realized Oh God, like we don't have the space to accommodate these things. Maybe there are some solutions we can do to make our space more efficient. And that was a huge unlock was actually realizing that.

Similar to like if you can do things to automate or make your work life more efficient, it turns out that there's a whole kind of cottage industry around making your space, even if it's really small. You get more juice out of the space if you have the right. Juice out of the caboose. Juice out of the caboose. And it's actually crazy. I think that was, you know, one of those like mind emoji things where.

I started walking around our space and noticing all the issues I have, like where do the shoes pile up? Where do we constantly have clutter? And then I ended up going to stores and being thinking about, are there solutions for us that can make this feel cleaner or to allow this problem to not exist anymore? Yeah. And I think that's why the condensed timeline was also helpful because I think there's the sunk cost. aspect of this where you're like, we have a fruit bowl.

It works. Fruit fits in it. Why do we need to replace this? But if you have a dedicated mindset to being like, I'm improving this space and every aspect of it, it's like, no, let's get rid of the fruit pool. Let's get something that's bigger because we always have it overflowing. More similarly, we also...

you know, in some ways in the past took an iterative approach of, okay, we have a couch and we have a table. So like, let's just move it around. Let's just add an extra container box. But that wasn't working. And so actually, in this case, something we did up front with the furniture was we tried like five different orientations of our existing furniture and realized none of it worked and we kind of were trying to not get rid of it all but we found that ultimately if we wanted to create a really

solid livable space that we we actually kind of needed to start from scratch yeah actually one of the scariest parts of this experience was early on we did what you said which is we moved all of our furniture around to see is there a better setup and i think we actually both agreed that what we currently had was the best setup for the furniture. But within the process of moving around, it's like, oh, if you want to improve this, you actually probably have to get rid of everything, which took me.

a long time to accept, but it actually sat in the back of my mind and percolated. And as I did things iteratively, like got us a new table that would be. sort of better for having six people, that then was a piece that we could build around that allowed us to make better decisions in terms of getting rid of things and then replacing them. Totally. All right. So let's get really practical because we did make a ton of changes.

Maybe one thing we can talk about is space optimization. So how do you actually take the space and make it less overwhelming where stuff is everywhere, which I think was mostly on me, but like, what did we do to change that? Yeah, a lot of it actually was the interior stuff, things that people wouldn't see. So I spent a lot of time in Target and then I ended up finding the container store.

which if I gave a tip for space optimization, my recommendation would be for people to walk around their house, sort of notice these problems like the buildup places or as you're cooking, what's really annoying that keeps happening to you. Just literally pay attention. go to the container store and walk every single aisle and you'll see things like.

Oh, I can't really organize my pots and pans without rejiggering it constantly. Well, you can actually have a pullout thing that gives like a deep cabinet a lot more functionality. And then you see a lot of baskets and sort of cute homes and they can be like nice raton looking baskets. If you have a... space where maybe you have books piled up on a coffee table, that can look nice. But if you have too many books, you actually might want to throw them in a basket or

I don't know, we had a helmet and a bike lock and other things that kind of piled up in this one space. We put a basket there. Baskets everywhere. Yeah, baskets everywhere. In fact, I went a little basket crazy, I think, but... i was surprised the way in which you can put sort of something that looks nice and it allows you to keep things looking clean without actually getting rid of them also

Take advantage, especially in the United States, of a very flexible return policy. Buy a bunch of baskets, try them out. Which one's the right size? Which one's the right look? Which one feels good? Which one stacks well? try those things out and then return the ones that don't yeah one little point on this idea of learning the skill of making your home better is i would say i probably got six to seven out of ten of every purchase is right

But I returned a ton of things. And that was especially true as we got new pieces of furniture and earlier decisions were based on what we currently had. But that didn't work for what we ended up with in the long term. So I bought more than I needed to.

Because you can't always visualize what it looks like in your place. That was something that I did over and over and over. And I was pretty ruthless about making sure I returned things really quickly if they didn't work. Because I didn't want us to just accumulate another set of things that weren't good for us.

Totally. Let's go through more of these space optimizers. So another one was a hanging pot rack, which I feel like I always saw in really cool looking kitchens and I thought it was more of an aesthetic thing. This thing has been awesome just because pots and pans are so awkwardly shaped. And to your point, we did get the rollout drawer for our deep cabinets, but I feel like everyone should have a hanging pot rack.

yeah well there was this fundamental problem that we had too many appliances for our space and there was nowhere to put them and there was a few things we did so one we made our interior shelves more efficient at holding things and getting to them Then the second was we got a baker's rack, which is sort of a bookcase. But in our case, we put a blender there. Everything. Okay, an Instapot. We put our water filter. Our tea, our coffee. Yeah. Different.

grains, it all fits on this baker's rack. Things that were previously in drawers or took up counter space, actually that enabled something which was important to me, which is I didn't want to throw away appliances because I didn't have a big enough space. I actually wanted to get more.

this baker's rack allowed us to have more appliances and yet it felt like we had more space. And then as you mentioned, this pot rack, I was very unsure about it, but we had this wall space just above our sink, which wasn't being used at all. And it turns out you can use that wall space to hold, I think we have maybe eight to 10 items on it. It's pretty cool.

Yeah. Including a hanging plant. Including, yeah, a nice hanging plant. And in fact, I think my original vision was to have a bunch of plants there, but we are not that great at taking care of plants. So I backed off on that one.

Well, we now have a fake plant. We're a fake plant family. Oh, that's going to be controversial. I know. Another simple thing we did was better trash cans and soap dispensers, which sounds, again, all this sounds... really silly mundane like is this really going to change your life i'm telling you the right trash cans the automatic soap dispenser that senses my hand both from superhuman is that right simple human simple human

Okay. So like you could talk about what's going to change your life. I don't think soap dispensers and trash cans will, but this is an example of problems that you notice as you're living. As I was cooking and I was handling meat or other things, I have to wash my hands a bunch. Right. And so. found an automatic soap dispenser partially inspired by the things I saw in Japan.

so yeah you do that when you're cooking meat and you don't have to worry about touching things in the same way so that to me is not necessary for most things like i don't need it in the bathroom really but this made the experience of cooking better and i only noticed that as i was cooking more and in the case of the trash can

It was a practical thing we needed instead of, we had two really big ones. We ended up the simple human dual one that has a compost caddy. And it's like all your trash is in one small space and actually ends up being really nice. Yeah. And again, I think. Some of these things, are they going to change your life? No. Are they going to enhance it? Yes. And I actually think these kind of storage opportunities and these things that just reduce clutter make things a little more logistically.

smooth are really worth investing in because you'll go to a place like container store and you're like, okay, am I really going to spend a hundred dollars on a trash can? However, if you make 10 of those improvements and you spend a grand, that sounds like a lot. Yet people will spend like $6,000 on a couch. You know, I just think some of these smaller things, it is actually worth going a little bit more premium because they're all over your house.

For sure. And the small things actually add up to a big thing, which is a better feeling of the experience in your house. But actually a general thing I would recommend is we have a bunch of deep cabinets and we ended up putting containers in those cabinets as well too. organize, say your grains or your Tupperware.

We previously had this stuff sort of loosely sitting in the cabinets. And so it would become really cluttered and hard to get to. And we even did this in our fridge as well, where you have your berry container or your place for cheese. It makes the experience of like unloading groceries nicer.

And as I'm talking about this, it's like, wow, we're getting really old. This is the stuff we're getting jacked up about. But those simple things would not be noticed at all by any guests in the house, but as an actual user of the house.

It's similar to having, I don't know, a keyboard that you really like that feels really good. Totally. Actually, speaking of hosting, you also made some improvements to that experience. So what did you change there? Yeah, so I think one of the...

things that struck me most about our trip to japan was the way in which japanese restaurants actually present food they often have little ceramics for each little dish and it kind of keeps like your eating experience very clean but also pleasant and i think overall i came away with the idea that

The way that you present your food or deliver it to people, including yourself, actually changes the eating experience and your perception of it. And so we brought back some like nice bowls and stuff from Japan. But I think I also spent a decent amount of time at Crate and Barrel getting large sort of serving bowls or more salad bowls or better tongs for them or things that I previously wouldn't have invested in.

As I've gone to people's houses, I've noticed people have varying degrees of this. Like some people won't even give you plates or napkins. It's like a very do-it-yourself experience. I think when I'm 80, I'm probably going to give people paper plates, right? Like there's also something to not washing things and just saying, fuck it, I'm too old. But for now, it's fine. You just sort of pick up on...

things that make an experience either smooth or uncomfortable for people. And so we got a caddy that you can put on your table that fits your silverware, napkins, serving spoons, et cetera. Instead of laying out the silverware for each person or having people kind of get that from somewhere else, you actually can just sort of pass around this caddy and everyone has the things that they need to eat. And it's a subtle thing that...

You would notice that good restaurants sort of, why are they good? Often they make the experience of being there sort of seamless and you can just really enjoy every piece of it and not worry about the logistics. So there's many things in that vein that were done.

Yeah. One thing that people love are your name card holders. Yeah. Well, okay. So there's things that are unnecessary too, which you can only have the unnecessary stuff once you have the basics right. But we have these little name card holders that... are kind of cool in and of themselves. But what I do before guests come to dinner is I use my typewriter and I write someone's name and then I don't know what else I do. Can you describe it? You basically give them really...

Funny, clever, only a close friend would refer to them as labels. And they're typically timely. We haven't had, since this is recent, too many repeat guests, but I get the sense that you would update them every time. Also because people take theirs home. So you have to recreate them each time. But when I started getting into CGMs, you're like, Steph Smith, something, something.

wearing a cgm and it was it's just funny or clever jokes where someone's like i feel seen but also you're kind of in some cases as a friend would making fun of them yeah and i also think of it from the perspective of if one of the guests read the other person's name

card, maybe they would know them better or learn something or think something is funny and they're actual typewritten things. And it feels personal. Some people, as you mentioned, have taken them home, but also it's fun for me as the host. It's like a little joke. You know, I have these name cards at my silly little apartment and we all have our seats. But I don't know. I think as you kind of build out.

a baseline space you can think of what are the cute touches that are uniquely me that make this kind of fun or funny and so we've incorporated some of those as well and i don't know i get a lot of joy out of that and so if for no other reason i would recommend finding your own way of doing that and actually we went to a friend's house recently for dinner and we had let her borrow our typewriter for three months and she prepared this really nice meal but she also had a menu

typewritten on some really fancy typewriter paper. And I'm like, oh no, you're like one up in my game here. Using the typewriter to like do fun things.

Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think these are not need to haves, but actually maybe one key takeaway here is we've talked a lot about. kitchen optimizations or improvements and getting special gear and making it more interfaceable. But the reason we did that is because one of our core things was we wanted to have people over more. So actually that was the foundation.

for our other decisions. So maybe let's talk about that. How did that decision, which might be different for another couple, change the way that we actually rethought the entire space, which included some of the more major changes like changing our furniture?

So I found that as we were living here, we actually wanted to host people more. It's a very common way to interact in San Francisco and I guess at our age. But the experience of that was suboptimal, like the experience of cooking was suboptimal. Our table was too small.

If you had four people, it felt cramped. One time we had six, which I mean, isn't even that many people, but it was like mega cramped. And it just took away from the experience because we're all like sitting on top of one another. So the biggest decision. on that front was to get a bigger table. And to get a bigger table, we actually had to get rid of other things. Yeah, but I actually think this is really important because for us,

kitchen table was the linchpin, which everything else rested on. But that was actually really helpful because I think I'm certainly like this and a lot of other people who are rethinking their space. They don't know where to start and they're indecisive. Do I get rid of everything or start with one thing? And starting with one thing that you concretely know you want to change and optimize for is really helpful. So we started with the kitchen table with a specific...

goal of having at least six people fit comfortably but that naturally led to everything else like the next step clearly after that was okay so what chairs do we get and talk about constraints i think another key learning throughout this process was

again, because there's so many stores with so many products out there, for each decision, is there some sort of constraint? So for the chairs, one of the constraints was, I know this sounds obvious, but is it comfortable? And that was really helpful because... If I just went online and I looked at Wayfair, for example,

There was so many cheap, cool looking options where I was like, oh, this looks great. But we had no idea if it was comfortable. So that immediately slashed those options. And then because, again, we had this constraint of is it functional and comfortable? We just went to West. We went to crate and barrel and we just sat in a bunch of chairs and that eliminated like 90% of them. I think there was only two that we actually thought, huh, I could actually sit in this. Yeah.

I mean, on the comfort piece too, it all goes back to what you're optimizing for. So you could have the most stylish home ever, but it doesn't feel super livable. Comfort, like you say, it's an obvious thing, but I wanted a chair where if I was working at home, I could sit in it for three hours.

and it would be fine our previous chairs were sort of dinky and they didn't actually feel good enough for this new table we have so there's another dynamic of like you have to be careful if you upgrade one thing

You might end up upgrading more things because it's like, oh, for a nice table like this, you can't have dinky chairs. And that's a trap I think people fall into, too. Exactly. But that was actually. Huge, which meant that we could actually select and order chairs within, what, a matter of days after selecting our table. Well, yeah, if you were less picky, it actually would have been instantaneously. I know, I know.

but again i think i'm not alone in every family there's going to be people who are more indecisive and so if you can find something that cuts off the options especially for home optimization it's really helpful another example of this for us was when we got to the couch

The first thing we did is we took out a measuring tape and we said, this is the absolute max and this is the absolute minimum length and depth of the couch without even looking at the options online, which meant that we pulled up, you know.

honestly dozens of couches that we thought looked interesting but the first thing we did is we cross-referenced the dimensions and if it wasn't within that range it was just like nope nope nope nope and again it eliminated honestly what do you think 80 of the options yeah for sure it can be really overwhelming when you're buying things like a couch so in our case we wanted the biggest possible couch that we could have

We previously had the dinky couch that was sort of uncomfortable because of how small it was, even though it looked pretty nice. And we were like, okay, how much couch can our space accommodate? And the same was true of the table as well, which was optimizing for...

We want as many people as possible to be able to sit here. You could come up with a different set of criteria though. Like you may not want to maximize your couch space. Exactly. So why don't we walk through the rest of the living area? We started with the...

dining table that was our linchpin that allowed us to select chairs and then i mean once we had the table the interesting thing is it felt like the whole thing was 80 done it was like wow this change alone made a big difference But then the question was, should we continue along the project? And my like mind by the point we got this was like, I actually want to keep making this space better. Like we had this coffee table.

That looked fine, but it was just this thing that ended up not being functional. And I think one of the big changes we made was we didn't just get better things, but we got things that were also way more practical. And I think that's super important when you have a small space because every piece matters. And so we ended up getting rid of that along with everything else. Yeah, but it also fits into...

What you said, which is to take stock of how you use a space. So one of the things previously that prevented us from getting rid of that table was we had a TV on it. I think I was the one who was like, oh, we might use the TV. We've watched a movie. five times on it and then if we actually were to be honest like we hadn't used it in probably four to six months and so it was a clear decision to be like you know what actually

We're going to get rid of the TV, which means we can get rid of the table, which means we can have a way smaller table and make the few things that we actually use the room for, which again are eating, working, reading, for that to be the primary. But you know what made...

getting rid of the coffee table more palatable to you was not this practical thing of we use that are not was we had that up against a wall that had a ton of vertical space. And so you actually liked that the TV kind of took some of that vertical space and didn't have this big blank wall.

And so I was thinking like, is there something we can do with this wall? And I ended up finding some art that completely solved the problem, right? Yeah. And actually talk about budget. When I hear art, I'm like, oh gosh, are we spending thousands of dollars on a piece? You got these very large three panel pieces of art that look great on Amazon. Yeah, that's true. And how much were they?

I think the piece that you're talking about was only 150 bucks and it actually looks pretty good. Like it's nicely framed. Yeah, it came in the frames. That's the craziest part. Yeah, I guess I've probably seen large three piece wall art in different people's places. But I didn't even know that that was a solution for that wall. And in fact, we talked about many things in the months prior, like, oh, we could have a bookshelf here. We can have a big media console.

And all of that, again, it wasn't actually useful. It was just solving this problem, which is like the space looks kind of ugly when you have this big old wall here. And once we had the art, then we can make the decision, get rid of the coffee table and the harder one of let's get rid of this reading chair that we really enjoy. But in doing so, we can actually get a new couch that's going to even be more joyful.

So what's the deal with the couch? What did we do? What did we do? Well, I will say with couches and a few other things like rugs, you should really go into the showroom. So I want to just give like a practical tip, which is I spent a lot of time in.

west elm and crate and barrel and i spent a lot of time online looking at what they had but then i spent a number of occasions actually going through their showrooms actually seeing the spaces and getting inspiration by how they laid things out sitting on things like couches seeing what rugs look like that's an almost an unskippable step in my mind if you're going to invest in furniture and the couches were like the chairs in that a lot of them are

uncomfortable oh god yeah i mean it's hard to find a comfortable couch i'm mentioning that just again as a constraint so many options okay select the ones that you like and then go try them out and half of them you're going to remove because of pure functionality. For sure. So on the couch thing, we actually reverted back to our old ways in a sense, I think largely because of you, not to blame anyone. But I found, I think, two couches that I was going to be really stoked about.

I had sat on both of them. And then you're like, ah, a little hesitant about making the decision. And we ended up looking for them on Facebook Marketplace, which another just hack is I think West Almond Crate and Barrel. are a step above ikea because a lot of people kind of buy them they're like a mid-tier entry point there is a lot of stock on facebook marketplace so we actually did find a couple versions of the couches we wanted on facebook marketplace i reached out to people

One of them had dog scratches. We even considered getting that, but we did go through a week where we were considering getting it from someone else. And the real problem with that is often you have to go pick it up. Maybe it's not in great condition. And we eventually decided to just pull trigger by buying one online. But as a final step, Brugal Steph ended up coming in and saying, hey, why don't we go to the West Elm outlet?

tomorrow and just see what they have and so i had bought this couch online and i'm like oh god like it's an hour and a half away but okay let's do it and by the grace of the gods the universe whatever you want to call it the couch that we bought was actually there it had arrived the night before and we ended up getting it for like 900 cheaper

And having it delivered. Including transportation, because these outlets obviously know that people don't always have massive U-Hauls. So they partner with local moving. companies who basically if you go there and you like one of the couches they'll text them and i think in our case what it costs 150 or something for the transportation yep so same day we go

We get our couch. Some guy drives it for us. We arrive home. It shows up like an hour later. I will say, because we've talked to friends about this, it sounds like the outlet. So there's West Elm and Crate and Barrel. and probably others that have outlets, they're hit or miss. So you can go and explore, see a bunch of things that aren't a fit and go home empty handed, which really sucks if you're driving an hour and a half away.

But in our case, we saved $900 and felt real good about our purchase. For sure. And I mean, if you're skittish on spending a bunch of money on furniture, I think it's worth doing that and or going on Facebook Marketplace. Those are very viable things for couches.

It's what we did for all of our other couches before this one. I think it's the first new couch that we bought and couch, table, chairs, those end up being some of the more expensive things that people buy. So it's worth looking around so that you feel good about it. Yeah, we also got like a blue mushroom looking lamp, you know, they've got some cool stuff.

You don't like this lamp very much, but. That's actually an example of reverting to old ways of buying something that kind of looks cool. It doesn't fit in with the space and we actually didn't need it. I do have a case against that mushroom lamp. Okay. Okay. Well. Outlets, I think, hit or miss, but can be a nice family trip to go try things. And if you're lucky, you might find something really good and save a lot of money. In other cases, it might just give you a little bit of inspiration.

Yep. All right. So we talked about the living area. We talked about starting with the table. We found constraints for things like the couch and the chair. We also got some nice art, replaced the coffee table. Is there anything else you want to call out? I mean, one thing that's interesting as I went through this process, and it's very difficult to describe how iterative it was. I didn't set out with a project to change our entire house.

That's what ended up happening. And I think had I started out with that, I would have been overwhelmed and I wouldn't have done anything probably. But as we got one thing, it became clear that we might have another thing. And all of this could probably be solved by hiring an interior designer who just comes up with an actual visual of your space. We weren't ready to do something like that. That can also take forever.

It could. Yeah. So there's downsides of that. I think there is a downside of doing it the way I did, which is it was a new skill. It was difficult. And there was the risk that I didn't actually have the aesthetic sensibility to bring things together. Something I'd like to call out is I ended up doing most of this on my own, partially because it was me who really wanted to get it done.

But in the beginning, I was checking with you on a lot of things. Hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And over time, you were just like, I trust you to make the decision. And I think that that was a really important part of actually making it happen in a short period of time, because without that, we would just get into decision paralysis. The things that you were involved in took much longer.

naturally, because you have a different opinion. I'm just less decisive. Less decisive, also less willing to spend. You also weren't in the project in the way that I was. I was literally going to bed. And as I was going to bed, I'm like... oh my God, that container would be perfect for this space.

In the same way that work problems or writer's problems pop into people's minds, my mind was obsessed with this thing where I was making a nightly checklist. There's probably hundreds of things I ended up doing in the end.

Having that decision-making authority and actually someone to sort of drive that forward seems important because, you know, if you're two busy people, this stuff takes a lot of time and you make mistakes. So you sort of need someone to drive it forward. Yeah. And on the budget side.

I think for people who maybe are a little cheaper like me, what was really helpful is just to get a sense of high level budget. So I could be like, okay, if we're spending like something in the range of 10K, I don't need to know the precise number.

I'm okay with that for the project versus specific items. That was a lot harder for me to see a container and be like, we're going to spend $50 on a container or we're going to spend... x thousand dollars on a couch that for whatever reason was tougher for my psychology which is why i think it was actually helpful for like you said me to bow out and only on things that you wanted

a second opinion on. In fact, the second half of the remodel, like once we got the table and chairs, I was gone for a week or two. And then I came back and it was just done. That's right. In fact, that's what I would recommend is have your partner leave.

and there was actually a very good reason for that too because in the two weeks that you were gone in the same way that sometimes you need to make a space messy to clean it up that's what happened here there's the process of getting rid of things there's the process of moving around there's the process of getting new things having the packaging whatever it's like not sexy stuff but

the house was a total mess as i was figuring out the madness at one point i bought like 15 pillows throw pillows and they're just like scattered around so i was very glad you weren't here at that point and i actually returned to all of them it ended up not being the solution which is

kind of funny. But one of the ways I knew I was on track, you went away for that 10 days. And when you came back, your reaction was actually very surprising to me and encouraging. I was kind of worried. Like what happened? It was awesome. That's right. It was awesome. No, but actually it was really nice because again, we had done everything so iteratively in the past and not in a good way. So coming back and just.

seeing the before and after was really cool which was good because i was starting to go a little mad actually in the head like we said at the outset you get real into it in fact there were times where i was like just wait for the table and you're like

I got to go to Crate and Barrel. That's right. I was very impatient. I mean, I think what we did probably could have taken three or four months and it would have been less hectic. Though there was something about getting obsessed with something for a short period of time. And actually an important framework, I think you mentioned price and frugality.

Something I thought a lot about as I went through this, as I struggled to make certain decisions, we don't know how long we're going to be in this apartment. I think it's different if you have a house that you're going to be in for a while. And the apartment is laid out in a... certain way. It's maybe smaller than a future place that we'll have. And so as I thought of different pieces, there was this important thing of, am I optimizing for the space or am I getting a forever piece?

And if I'm just optimizing for the space, which is the case of something like we got a media console that was smaller than I probably would have in a different space, I'm not going to go balls to the wall in terms of how much I spend on this, even if there are nicer ones that may look better.

I'm actually going to trade off on price here because I may not want this piece in the future. And so is this a forever piece or is it sort of a temporary thing? And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind, because if you treat everything as a forever piece. The budget quickly goes from 10K to 40K. And of course, as you buy more expensive things, there's the dynamic of maybe not wanting to get them.

dirty or being fearful of them getting knocked i think that's another piece too in terms of the practical living is you don't want to have a space that's like so nice and so perfect that you don't feel comfortable living in it i always laugh when people have plastic all over their nice couches because they don't want them to get ruined and i'm like okay i get it but i mean come on it's like maybe you shouldn't have bought this couch

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cal, I don't think we're ever going to be a plastic couch family. But before we get onto some of the learnings, the takeaways, I want to just call out a few things that I thought were just great additions to the home. So we covered a few of them, but one of the changes you made was the lighting. In particular, by our beds, you've got these little lights that have three gradations of intensity, and you just tap the side of the light at night.

And it turns the light on. Honestly, it's really nice. And again, I think these were probably, what, 30 bucks on Amazon? Yeah, these are an example of like something to pack a better punch for the price. Yeah, those were great. Other small things, like this was a while ago, but you got this mat that you stand on when you're doing dishes. It's another example of just, oh man, so much nicer. You also got...

Again, not super expensive, but certainly much better than what we had before. Maybe like a $200 speaker that looks nice and sounds nice in our main living area. So great for when we're hanging out, when we have guests over. like really nice addition to the space. Yeah. And those are interesting things because they don't sound sexy. I mean, okay. So you got a lamp that changes shades or whatever, but it's more like when we thought about how we were living our space, we had.

two bedside tables only one of them had a lamp and i know when i was reading if you weren't yet there and i wanted to go to sleep i had to kind of crawl over the side of bed turn it off it's not that annoying But it is really nice now that we have one on each side and we have these new bedside dressers that are more space efficient. They allow you to slot a laptop and they just...

Collectively, these things make living in the home really nice because they're optimized for how we lived. And actually... If I were to recommend someone who's like thinking about their home project, it's really important that you live in the space and you actually know very much like what your pain points are because they may not be relevant to someone else, but.

They're game changers for you. Like, I think it's funny that you think the speaker is this big improvement, but I think the real change is not just that we have a speaker that looks nice. It's the fact that we actually use music more as we... eat dinner and just made it easy and a no-brainer to throw on a couple of tunes and enjoy a meal it's so good it's honestly i think one of the best

adjustments and i'm sure many people have speakers but i think actually what maybe partially inspired the speaker upgrade was our last night in japan we stayed in a nice enough hotel and they just had really high quality speakers like way higher quality than what we even have now playing classical music just like subtly in the background and we we loved it we loved it so much that we left it on as we slept and I just I don't know I think

A lot of the time when people are listening to music, they're listening to Spotify and it's, you know, top hits with lyrics and all this stuff. But I think we forget sometimes how just really subtle music can enhance a space. 100%.

So a few other quick things. You also upgraded our knives. So another one of these just like super practical. You're cooking a lot. You want good knives. we've had this for a while but we do have a mini fridge in our office i think that's like a super easy like 70 upgrade that if you've got an office why don't you have a mini fridge yet and then

On the lighting side, you also improved the lighting across our house with different dimmers and lights that you can modify the color of. Yeah, the lighting one is interesting because I consider that somewhat of a failure. I actually... I've become somewhat more sensitive to lighting as I've gotten older.

We have a bunch of overhead lighting. And if it's on too late in the night, then it sort of disrupts my system or it just feels bad. And actually, when we were hosting people, that was my biggest frustrations is it was too bright or too dark. And so I tried to solve that problem by replacing all of the overhead lighting that ended up failing for technical reasons. However, I was able to come up with like a hacky solution of now there's dimmers everywhere in the house.

and getting more floor and table lighting. And actually, when I was a younger lad, I was in Romania and I met someone who was a wedding planner and we were out at this restaurant and she was explaining to me what they were doing with lighting. And that was the beginning of my understanding that lighting really does sort of determine mood and experience in a way that is...

actually not so subtle, although you don't notice it when it's good. You may notice it when it's bad and it's kind of hard to get right for different spaces. But I think changing the lighting alone can completely change your space in the absence of any other changes. Yeah, I think lighting, sound, and white space are three things that people don't pay attention to as much because they're not items, right? It's like not a table, it's on a couch, but they really change the feeling of a space.

What about you, Cal? Are there any specific things that you think like the mini fridge or the light dimmers that you think have been enhancements? There's a lot of things, especially as we've lived in it now for a couple months post what. you know, quote unquote, sprucing up the space, like the baker's rack that we have just for our personal use case, the ability to have more of these appliances and to be able to pull them out easily, that from a functional.

side has been awesome and i think aesthetically it looks fine too but it literally was like a game changer going from what felt like constant clutter and annoyance to something that is like super smooth and has changed my idea from thinking that our space is too small. That is one of like the fundamental shifts in the whole thing was just like, oh, you don't actually need an apartment with more space. You just need.

things that make it more space efficient and i think from like a living functional perspective as well i didn't realize how important it was for me to have a reading and couch space i now find myself on our couch all the time in the morning we have this nice accent chair that we got that by the way i didn't know i needed until i borrowed and or stole one of my friends accent chairs just for a couple of days and put it in our space seeing what that would do to it

And literally every morning I go there and I sit and I read and I have a coffee that sits on this nice little drink holder thing. And I find it awesome each time. I wasn't chilling in our living room and now I'm there all the time. And I personally was sort of missing. a place that i enjoyed being in and it's made me like our home a lot more with like some pretty simple changes and i think maybe sometimes people should think about that which is the opportunity cost of not having

a space that you really enjoy. Yeah, I think one takeaway that only came to mind as you were just talking is as people are taking stock of their home and what's maybe broken where things are accumulating also take stock of the areas of your house where you spend no time. Yeah. And there's a reason for it.

almost always. And it's probably because there's a TV and you don't watch TV or it's like, there's a couch, but it's really uncomfortable. Use that as an opportunity to maybe override the sunk cost of, okay, but the space exists, the couch exists. to get rid of that thing and replace it with something maybe even completely new like you don't need to do couch for couch like you said we kind of rethought that space entirely

Yeah, for sure. Another thing that came to mind as you're speaking is we had this side table next to my side of the bed that I thought looked nice. But it was constantly overridden with things. And I dropped my phone and spilled water. And it was just like a big hassle thing for me. And I replaced it with like a relatively affordable newer side table that was more functional for what I was looking for.

And as I go to bed, I kind of smile inside each time because I'm like, this is way better. And even the drawer where I keep like my socks and underwear, I just put a little divider in it from the container store. And it's a really small thing, but instead of having this one drawer where everything's sort of bunched together and I can't find things quickly, I now have this nice segmentation of socks and underwear that makes, you know.

putting laundry away nice. And it's like simple stuff like that, that continues to pay dividends in a way that I don't know, I didn't realize until I lived in a space for a while. And now I'm learning that you can actually make it way better. I guess that's the point of having your own space in some sense.

Yeah. And actually the container store is just a great place to go for inspiration. I was like, oh, I didn't know I could optimize this in this way. Yeah. I mean, that was just a constant theme in this whole thing is there were many pieces or things that I didn't know existed.

And now that I do, I actually think I could go in someone's home, watch them and be like, hey, you could use this. It's like 20 bucks. And this thing that you keep doing is not going to be a problem anymore. You know what also brings me joy? What? Our living room is kind of surf themed. When I sit on the couch or anywhere in the room, I almost feel like I'm in the inside of a wave and I have my surfboards out too. I don't know. It makes me feel like I'm closer to the ocean or something.

It's definitely very surf themed and in a good way. I think that's another constraint though, right? Like this is more surf themed. office due to the nature of my studio is a little darker. But again, all of that is a constraint when you're buying things. Even another constraint that I hadn't thought of till we did our remodel is once you pick one major piece of furniture, that would...

is going to eliminate a bunch of other options in a good way, right? Where you're not going to have eight different colors of wood in a room. And so, yeah, I think...

Start with one thing, even if it's a concept like a surf vibe, and that can really, really, in a positive way, reduce the options. Okay, well... We went through a lot. Do we want to go through just like rapid fire some of the key learnings for people who maybe want to upgrade their space? Well, sure. So I think the first thing, I don't know if it's a lesson, but I will say that.

During this period, a tape measure became my best friend. I literally had a couple around the house at all times and I was constantly measuring things. And some people have blueprints of their home or whatever that. would make this process easier. But really understanding like the dimensions of your space and having a tape measure that you both keep in the house and as you go to the stores is super helpful for making good decisions and or avoiding bad ones.

And then another one that I guess we haven't talked about at all is because it was a new skill for me and I don't have any interior designer friends. I ended up using chat GPT a lot. And it ended up being like an interior designer for me, but also a buddy to bounce ideas off of. And so practically speaking, what I would do is I would make some changes and I would take a picture.

And then I would upload it and be like, hey, what do you think about the space? Like, what are some improvements that I could make? And it was actually shockingly good at pointing out things I could do differently. And one of the ones that I actually took away that made a difference later on was. The idea of how like a rug or blankets or like a throw pillow or even the furniture you have can look really flat if you don't have any texture.

And it can also look too busy if you have too much textures or things that clash. That was a very iterative process of figuring out what is the right level of adding texture. I would change something or in the case of buying the 14 pillows, take new pictures, be like, hey, chat GPT, what do you think of this? It was a really useful thing. And one of the things that I struggled the most with was rugs. I still

I don't know anyone who's good at that, you know, value them, make friends with them. But it seems like a simple thing, but actually a rug can really transform a space. And ChatGPT helped me think about rugs, like the different textures, but also the...

pros and cons of those, like how easily cleanable are they in terms of structurally thinking about making different purchasing decisions. That was a reliable resource that I went to almost daily. Yeah. I think what I saw as you were using chat GPT is that. Design sometimes is very hard to explain.

especially since that's not our background, but you do kind of have a sense of what you like or don't like. So sometimes we were unsure about something and you'd ask ChatGPT and it would just articulate it in a way that was clear. And we're like, oh yeah. That's what it was, right? Like we didn't like it for some reason and it's because it was just too flat. And then you compare it to something else and maybe we don't like either option, but it gave us a terminology to understand.

The super vague sense we had that we liked or didn't like something. And then we could action it as well. It also helped you think through decisions that relied on other decisions. So like I would give it. a few different couches or just like screenshot them from a website and be like, Hey, I'm thinking about these couches and these coffee tables. How would you think about combining these things? What are the trade-offs? Because it is true that let's say you bought a table.

for hosting and that's your centerpiece but then you want to replace your couch and your coffee table if you buy the coffee table before the couch you may then find that the couch doesn't work with the coffee table or like it takes up too much space and if you bought the coffee table first

you would then be constraining your couch decision. And that's sort of a silly way to think about it. Yeah. And we should say there are tools that exist today that'll kind of give you full inspiration around an AI actually redesigning a room. We didn't use those.

But I know those are increasingly popular. So that's also an option. A couple of other ones. I would say different stores have different strengths. So if we look at where I spent the most money, it was Crate & Barrel, West Elm, Amazon, Wayfair, Target. In that order. Yeah. In that order. Creighton Burrell and West Elma would put them in the same category of

Expensiveness, but I found that they were good for different things, at least for my aesthetic and purposes. So Crate and Barrel, I ended up getting way more kitchen stuff there. I think they're serverware and things that may facilitate hosting are better. Whereas West Elm, they have sort of a brighter vibe, a little less stodgy. So for design inspiration, I like their accent chairs a lot better. I think their couches were better.

And so as I started to think about some of those decisions, I went to each of those stores for different things. And then Wayfair, which is sort of like online marketplace, various ranges of furniture, maybe a step above Ikea in some sense for what you can get.

But they have endless options. And I think for those furniture items that you don't care as much about, like a side dresser by your bed, or in our case, a coffee table that's optimized for our space or a media console that wasn't going to be a forever piece.

That's often where I got those. And then Target was good for kitchen stuff and throw pillows and some practical things. And of course, the container store was awesome for basically make your space more optimal or... spruce it up a little bit and so i kind of learned the unique things that each store offered versus i think you could go into one of these stores and they have collections so we could have bought

The table from Crate and Barrel gotten the chairs that match that table, the media console, whatever. And that alone would have cost the whole project. But I actually found some of those pieces that like all matched together pretty stodgy. And I ended up enjoying more actually the sort of like random bringing together of pieces from different places versus just having one uniform collection.

Yeah. And you also found some deals, huh? Deals. Yeah. There's different ways to get deals. So that's another lesson I think, which is that you don't need to spend a fortune. even if you're going to Crate and Barrel in West Elm. And if you wanted stuff from those stores, like you could try Facebook Marketplace. The way I would do that is go into a store, see what you like.

identify the pieces online, and then you can literally search for those on Facebook marketplace or set up a tracker to find those things. We didn't end up going that route. You can go to their outlets. And then these stores always have, many of them have sales. And so if you're patient waiting for a Black Friday or they often change things seasonally, and so they have big sales before the summer or actually July as they're getting rid of summer things, et cetera.

And so you can sort of wait as you identify the different pieces as you're willing to be patient there. And then I use Capital One Shopping, which is a browser plugin that probably steals all my data and sells it somewhere. But one thing that happens is as you browse different stores online, a day or two after I did that, I would get a...

email from Capital One Shopping being like, hey, you can get 30% back on this coffee table if you buy it now. And so I ended up getting some percentage of the dollars back. just by naturally browsing online and then getting these notifications. And of course, accepting the trade-off that my data is probably now somewhere else. What about that website you showed me? We didn't use it a ton, but you could look up.

an item and then it would show you where else it was being sold oh no i forgot what that's called but it's it's definitely a new website and it was hit or miss basically you put in the url of the thing that you like and then they show you equivalent items. Because often what happens is West Elm doesn't make their own furniture. They white label it from somewhere. And so you actually may be able to find pretty much the same piece from somewhere else.

I don't think I ended up finding anything using that tool, but it was a cool idea that sometimes you're getting overcharged for the brand name, even though the furniture itself is not higher quality than say what you might get from Home Depot that sells the same thing just under a different name.

Awesome. We'll include that in the show notes in case it's helpful. But yeah, I don't think we found the most luck with it. My final piece of advice is to consider that getting rid of stuff isn't always easy. Whenever you're buying something, at some point you're going to have to... get rid of it and in the cases of couches or coffee tables or whatever you can't always like donate them easily

And I lucked out and because we got rid of so many things that I had a friend who bought a house right at the same time I was doing this project. And so I was able to give him some of our old items and get rid of them without the hassle. But that gave me a lot of anxiety because.

I find selling things on Facebook marketplace to be really stressful because people are negotiating. You sort of have to be on time. People may have to come to your house, which doesn't always feel the safest. And that takes time, right? Like if you have one couch and you need to replace it.

Then you have to have two couches in your house at the same time if you don't get rid of them. So it's just something to consider like as you buy things. And I think this is a general principle of clutter in your house that. You know, you kind of really want to make sure that it's something that's useful. Otherwise, you will have the tax of having to get rid of it. And that's sometimes hard even psychologically because you paid money for them or you've become attached to them.

Well, that's why you did the house project. So I mean, just kind of rounding the corner, I want to call out a few of the learnings that we talked about throughout. So first, super iterative process. I think it was actually really wise that you compress the timeline. So it wasn't this thing that... just felt like it was lasting forever and you get tired and you feel really good about the space when it's done.

I think some other things that were helpful were one, we knew what we were optimizing for, at least to start, which for us was having a good hosting experience. We also had one decision maker for the most part, which was you. And you made hundreds of decisions, went to stores dozens of times, and you just kind of were able to...

get fully in the mindset of this project and leave me out of it, which was for the best. I think also another thing was deciding what we wanted to invest in or not. As in, like you said, there were some items where we... maybe upgraded more significantly than others like the couch and then others where we're just like, you know what, we're just going to get this $100 baker's rack from Wayfair, for example. But I think actually the most important thing that we talked about throughout was...

paying attention to how you use your space. If you're approaching this kind of like someone coming into a company, imagine someone from a PE firm looking at a company and figuring out what's optimal here, what can I scrap, how can this become more efficient?

think you can do a similar exercise with your space like where's stuff piling up where am i bumping into things where do i not spend time just what's really annoying about this space and for the things that really pop out taking that approach of okay

Ignore the sunk costs. And accepting that you may not know the answer and that you're going to have to like surround and look at a lot of things. Like I can't emphasize enough how much of this was a learning process for me in terms of figuring out what can even go in a home. And some people are just.

on a different journey without maybe they've spent a lot of time furnishing homes or something but next time i do it i'm going to be even better it was really useful to learn this as a skill set though as i go into more like homemaking in the future or even thinking about spaces and what is required of them. It's really cool. It really feels like I learned something that you certainly don't learn in school.

That's why we did this episode. That's right. If people made it to the end here, hopefully they got it. But really, the point was, this is the kind of thing where you spend... So many hours in your home, and most of them are not optimized. And really, truly, other than this new spruce up, I don't think we've ever really lived in a space that we liked a lot. For sure.

You know, interestingly, now I go into homes and I see where people got things from. I can see the inefficiencies. I can see the really beautiful parts. And it's funny how different homes can be and also be as like magical in a way like we have these friends who have tons of plants and lots of floor seating and it it's way more nervous system friendly than our home and almost like feels messy but calming in this interesting way.

And that's really cool, too. It's just a totally different vibe. So you kind of got to figure out your own thing. But I will say the proof is in the pudding. We've now hosted more people. It's been a good experience. People kind of note things that they like or don't like. I think sometimes they're being friendly because they knew what a crazy man I'm.

became for like a month trying to figure things out but if the core problem was oh i don't like our home because it's too small and messy that's solved and then i don't like hosting people because it doesn't feel good to have this many people in our house at the same time, or there's real kinks in that hose, that problem solved too. And it's like, now you just can go on living. Like it was a one-off thing, including the expenses as well. It's not a permit expense.

now it's done and every moment we spend in this home from here on out is a little bit better and there's like a pretty big roi on that i think huge roi Massive ROI. Makes you wonder if we had made our Encinitas home nice, just how much longer we could have stayed there. No, no, no, no. The longtime listeners know that was a no-go and we're much happier in San Francisco.

All right. I think we've gone through all of it. Hopefully, if you're still here, you feel inspired to maybe do a little spruce up of your own. It's worth it. All right. Thanks for listening. Until next time.