Since 2016, I’ve packed my life up and moved a total of five times…four of which consisted of driving an entire two minutes down Pine Street. Still, every new room – my cinderblock refuge in Francis-Crawford to the sunny window desk in Georgia to my dust-ridden apartment by the river – was slowly and thoughtfully designed, inspired by my desire to create a piece of my family home in different versions.
As the people who love me most know, leaving home is hard. As a young girl, the most terrible thing my mom could say was one of two things: “It’s time to practice the piano!” or “You have a playdate after school today.” I remember so clearly a conversation I had with Mom while maybe ten years old, sitting on the couch in the living room as I cried over having to attend a sleepover that night. She told me this somewhat evergreen piece of wisdom: “If you don’t go, she’ll ask someone else to come.” I think I probably ended up going, afraid that my one friend would replace me just because I didn’t want to sleep in her bed. However, I do remember working through my options in my head, wondering if that friendship really was worth leaving my house.
When 2016 crept up on the heels of my family, my freshman year of college, I felt as if I was at a standstill of emotions. On one hand, I felt far past excited – all of my childhood dreams of becoming a Ouachita student were about to be fulfilled. But on the other hand, I felt unbearable sadness. I wasn’t scared or nervous for school itself; I just didn’t want that goodbye with my parents. Of course, August 18 came and went, we stood in the parking lot and sobbed, I dried my tears in the crammed closet-bathroom of Francie West room #115, and I got through it. What I wasn’t prepared for was the reoccurrence of those goodbyes each and every August since…every year, after a muggy Arkansas summer day of moving in, I was left with the same question. Why hasn’t saying goodbye gotten any easier?
Through all of my moves, I learned that a coping mechanism for that initial goodbye for me was being able to walk back into a home that I had created to remind me of the one I just left. Freshman year, that meant stealing a red velvet living room pillow with the corner chewed off by Henry the golden to keep on my bed. Sophomore year, that meant buying a rug that reminded me of Mom’s living room curtains. Junior year, that meant redesigning my corkboard with pictures of my family and friends. And senior year, that meant repurposing all of the old living room furniture from Haddock Street into my first college apartment interior design pieces.
A few weeks ago, I packed my life up once again and drove it in shipments to my corner apartment in Little Rock. My biggest move yet. I got my key at the beginning of the week, allowing me to bring boxes of books and baking dishes, bags of dresses, and baskets of shoes each day after work. Each night, I rigged a raggedy suitcase into a makeshift dolly – the most genius moving hack I’ve thought of thus far. (I’ve even made use of it for carrying in groceries!)
Now that I am all settled in, content with the level of cleanliness and design, my favorite thing to do is sit and admire the tiny world I’ve created in my tiny *city* home. Tonight, I wanted to share some of my favorite details and the stories behind how they came to be!
When I thought about my living room, I knew the most important thing for me would be the pictures. I heard someone once say that photographs are printed moments, captured behind glass. When I was in college, I would spend hours meticulously planning which picture would go in which frame the summer before I moved in, ensuring that all of my most special people were fairly represented. My Little Rock home wasn’t any different. I brought three mirrored gold frames I had bought last year from Home Goods and used a set of new gold frames from Amazon to create my gallery wall – featuring some of my most treasured photos, including the group picture of my college best friends outside our freshman year dorm. We took that picture the day we moved out in 2017, and I have hung it in my room every year since. I plan on doing so until I’m old and gray!
I also found it special to decorate with pieces I got from loved ones…the blue and white floral vases are from this sweet little shop in Arkadelphia called Mary and Martha’s ;), the coffee table was passed down from my Grayson’s apartment, and all of my coffee table books were either gifts or one of my many beloved Ouachita yearbooks – which are scattered all throughout the apartment!
To me, a kitchen is one of the hardest spaces to decorate, as your primary sources of décor are appliances. However, this kitchen is the perfect size – small enough where there isn’t a need for excessive decorating, and it has the cutest shelf above the sink for my stash of cookbooks. A majority of my cookbooks were gifts from my mom, while the rest were salvaged from one of my grandma’s donate piles. Mom remembers those books from her childhood, so they are very special to me to have now. My favorite though is the recipe book my mom made me, which is slowly filling up with recipes passed down from family and friends – including her famous chocolate chip cookies!
My favorite pieces in my kitchen however are my antique blue floral serving dishes. My grandma and Aunt Kathy picked up the butter dish and two other matching pieces at an antique shop in Topeka, Kansas. A week later, my parents took me to the Amity Trade Days down the road, and while scavenging dusty tables of kitchen utensils, I spotted the familiar deep blue – the entire set for $17. While I only use the butter, sugar, and mustard (for salt) dishes, they were all the decoration I needed!
And I can’t forget to mention my precious bunny tea towels, which were an Easter gift from Grandma. “Bunnies are love,” the card read.
When I first got my key to the apartment, I picked it up during my lunch break and took a moment to bask in what would soon be my home. I wandered around, envisioning all that it would look like even just a week from that moment. Of course, just as I had with every dorm room, I had already planned out where each and every thing would find its home in my head. However, when I opened the door to my bedroom, I fell in love with how the sun filtered into this corner. Originally, I had planned to arrange my bed and matching nightstands on the opposite wall, but after seeing the light, I knew I wanted to make a space where I could sit and read and write in the sun.
The green chair came straight from the guest room at home. While surely lived in, I loved the color, the velvet fabric, and the flat arms that serve as a bookrest and side table for journaling :) On the wall beside it, I nailed collected New Yorker covers – souvenirs I’ve made a habit of getting every time I visit Manhattan. I always find them from street vendors on the streets off of Central Park!
Of course, a very important part of any home is the library – something I have always, always, always wanted to have. For now, my library is spilling out of a desk turned bookshelf. Growing up, I always admired how my grandma stacked all of her books beside nightstands and already-filled bookshelves, creating almost entire pieces of furniture out of the books themselves. Until I get the floor to ceiling library I dream of, I’ll stuff and stack my literary criticism textbooks, Ian McEwan novels, and dog-eared favorites into my little red shelf – which was once used as a makeshift kitchen back when I lived with Keleigh, Kyla, and Brooke in Georgia-Hickingbotham Hall. It even still has remnants of Keleigh’s Keurig cup boxes that permanently sealed itself into the shelf’s history. And for a piece of home, the antique wicker-esque chair was my grammy’s, a chair I’ve had in my childhood room for as long as I remember.
But by far, my favorite, most beautiful part of the apartment is my bed. Last year, Mom came home and told me she had found an antique bed that could be so stunning if we put the time and thought into it. I was weary about it, but a little bit later, Mom bought the bed and we began to envision what all it could be if we redid it the right way. My first step was choosing a paint color and a fabric to go on the headboard. From there, we set up a studio in the back garage of the flower shop, spending so many sweaty hours with a sanding comb and a scraper. At the end of the summer, we had it perfected, new knobs, headboard liner, and all.
After finding cloud soft bedding, a heated blanket on low, and a stunning hand-sewn quilt mailed straight through a global pandemic from India, I will still say that a bed is only a bed with a carton of Ben and Jerry’s Tonight Dough and a matching set of pajamas. My bed has always been a special place to me – first, because I love to sleep, but second because I love that I always have a clean, soft place to come home to every night.
I could share so many more photos – the shelf my grandpa made in grade school that now holds my perfume, the picnic basket I keep in my entryway that Price and I found at a flea market, the dishes Mom collected for my hope chest over the past few years, the gingham jewelry tray I bought to match Grayson while traveling with the EEEs. Making a home is such a special, while scary, time. I think I love sitting and admiring it because everything I have is something beautiful I’ve collected throughout my life, all joining together here to tell a story. While my sweet friend group mostly dispersed after graduation and my family is still nestled into Arkadelphia, I feel as though my home holds every season of my life all together! I love it so.
Xo. A
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