Writing this book is surreal for me. It shouldn’t be; I go through the same writing rituals almost daily for my blog. But I’ve dreamed of writing a book since I was a little girl, thinking up stories of mermaids, lagoons, and adventure. If you had told me that one day I’d write a blog for hundreds of thousands of readers about life, design, DIY projects, and the general imperfection of it all, I would have laughed you out of the room.
I was a late-blooming DIYer. The crafting, painting, and decorating came later for me. After college, I married the goofy love of my life and promptly decorated our new home the way everyone else decorated—think commercial/matchy-matchy/brown furniture. There’s nothing wrong with brown, but there is something wrong with surrounding yourself with a space that’s not wholly you.
A few years later, after having my second child, I found myself craving more life, more inspiration, more everything for the little family I so cherished. On Christmas Day in 2009, I sat surrounded by crumpled wrapping paper and love all around. The need to write was so overwhelming I could taste it, and with that, the blog Perfectly Imperfect was born.
I really thought I was writing for me (and maybe for my mom and dad), but you know what? People started reading… real, live humans that were not related to me. It was thrilling, humbling, mind-blowing.
My husband, Matt (who you’ll see a lot of in this book), and I were in the middle of an attic renovation, and we were going with our gut in the decorating department, even though we had no formal training in architecture or design. We created our writing room, playroom, and home theater, and they were completely us. Creating those rooms on a budget led to an entire home transformation.
These makeovers are what got our blog moving around the World Wide Web, and they’ve been featured by (pinch me!) The Nate Berkus Show, Better Homes & Gardens, Cottages & Bungalows, Flea Market Style, Design Sponge, The Pioneer Woman, Apartment Therapy’s Color Contest, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, and Tori Spelling’s EdiTORIal, to name a few.
Somewhere in the middle of all that hoopla, it hit me: You can have the home you want… now. It may be a work in progress, but you can create spaces that are completely you and that inspire you every moment of every day. Our homes matter. Our families share everything there, and those moments become our lives. So where we share them—it matters.
Perfectly Imperfect then became a mission for us to empower you to pick up a paintbrush or a nail gun to create the home you want now. To go for it, and celebrate life’s imperfections. and create amid them anyway. You are what this is all about. Your homes, your lives, your families, and the imperfect beauty that lies within them all.
Because we fell in love with inspiring our readers to create their own havens, we opened a retail shop, Perfectly Imperfect (no surprise on the name), in our hometown square in Troy, Alabama. Soon after, we made our decor available in our online shop (www.perfectlyimperfectshop.com) and the rest, as they say, is history.
It has been some time since we opened our shop, and to say that we have been blessed is the understatement of the century. We continue to meet readers and customers, one after another, and with each encounter the drive to keep doing what we love grows.
There are big things on the horizon at Perfectly Imperfect, including the publication of this book, and we are so excited to see where it all leads. So come along with us for this part of the journey… it’s going to be a good one.