I didn't learn this in a studio. I learned it in a house, with a nail gun.

Before any of this, I spent seven years building a beauty business in Dallas. It was creative, it was mine, and I got good enough at it that other people paid me to teach them how to do it. It eventually gave me the opportunity to buy my first home. I had no idea that house would end up changing the direction of my career completely.

I'm the daughter of a general contractor, and what I learned from him is that with remodels the question is never whether something can be done, but how. So I don't walk away from a layout that isn't working. I carry it around for weeks, turning it over, until it clicks.

My first renovation was a three-bedroom brick home built in the 1980s. It had never been updated, but it had great bones. I opened up the small kitchen, dining, and living rooms into one connected space and reworked an awkward layout to create a large primary closet, a mudroom with laundry, and an additional flex space. I even laid every square foot of new flooring alongside my brother and friends.

When we sold that house, I took what I had made from the renovation and put it straight into our next one.

This house gave me more room to push myself: moving walls, reworking the kitchen, creating arches, adding built-ins, and making choices that felt less safe and much more like us.

But we couldn't afford to do every beautiful thing I could imagine all at once. So I never really stopped renovating. I've added picture frame molding, paneled walls, built built-ins, wallpapered rooms, reworked spaces, and slowly layered in the character we couldn't pay someone else to give the house on day one.

In a lot of ways, that's where my style has actually been built. Not by finishing a house all at once, but by living in it, seeing what it's missing, and being willing to keep working on it myself.