A big, beautiful room. Broad wall space. Huge, vast bookcases reach to the ceiling. Gorgeous windows bathe the entire room with sunshine.

Sounds magnificent, right? Very much so.

But, also, very daunting.

We are fortunate this month to highlight Katie’s living room as our featured home space. Two years ago Katie and her husband, Ryan, bought their home in East Memphis. Katie quickly fell in love with the living room but did feel overwhelmed with the space as it’s quite large and all consuming. She knew then that she didn’t just want to fill it with needless items simply for the sake of quick decorating. Katie realized she needed to wait and decorate it on her timeline; she needed to find pieces that worked just right for the room.

Moreover, Katie’s living room project allowed her to work alongside some of the people with whom Blue Pencil Home often collaborates. It’s important for us to work with those to whom we refer our clients, as we make personal recommendations about their services.

A collector of fine clothing goes to battle with…a small closet. This is a well known tale known by many a woman.

Maybe she has an older home from an era where large closets just weren’t built or large wardrobes didn’t exist. Maybe the home was built by someone who didn’t understand closet design. Whatever the issue, small closets and well-dressed women can be difficult combination.

But they don’t have to be.

This does, however, happen to the very issue for one of our wonderful return clients. We loved working with Lucia last fall as we helped her create functional organization systems for her closet. Her winter wardrobe was extensive and beautiful, bur it forced us to be creative and thoughtful in our design of a closet system that would actually work.

Lucia’s was a wardrobe that made us dream--beautiful pieces from around the world, reminiscent of places and people we only usually spy in magazine layouts or online brochures.

Katie and I were thrilled when Lucia reached out to us recently to help her shift her clothing from her fall and winter wardrobe to her spring and summer clothes. Her closet is well laid out in terms of space, it’s just a smaller closet than many we often see in the Memphis area. And it is a very small closet for a woman with as expansive of wardrobe as Lucia’s.

Imagine this: you have a beautiful, newly renovated kitchen. Bright, clean and classic. State of the art appliances.

And no cabinet doors.

Yes, that’s correct. A brand new kitchen with no doors on any cabinet. This was the our recent clients found themselves in when they reached out to us about organizing and decluttering their kitchen and pantry.

Not only did they not have any kitchen cabinet doors, but they had lived so long without the doors, that all of their items were spread out on every free space available in the kitchen. Everywhere we looked there was stuff layered and stacked.

Their beautiful, new kitchen was hidden. By stuff.