How to Finally Start Your Room Makeover: A DIY Home Stylist's Method for Breaking Creative Blocks
How to start redecorating when you don’t know where to begin
This is for the chronic DIY-ers out there like me: You’re completely bored of a room (or maybe the whole house) and you have some little ideas, but they’re not quite fully cooked. So you sit on them for months, getting increasingly more annoyed at the space you want to change, but you just don’t know where to start!
If you’re not hiring out a designer to to do the creative work for you (most people don’t), then it’s all on you to make every decision, factor in every element of the space, plan out your budget and find the time to just start. That’s so much for you to take on by yourself! Is it any wonder that you feel stuck?! NO. You have to be superhuman to think this is easy, even if you’re going in phases — honestly, especially if you’re going in phases.
The start-stop nature of DIY makes it easy to get blocked, lose the motivation and change ideas so many times that you never actually start. The internet is also full of DIY home decorating tips and decorating ideas that feel helpful in the moment, but when it comes to executing, they just create more confusion.
Listen, I experience this myself, even as a home stylist! Creative blocks are normal, and I always look at the positive side: at least you know you want to make a change. That’s a great starting point, we just need to shift the pressure to the right place to make room for creativity.
When I was little, my mom used to threaten to take everything out of my room because I couldn’t keep it clean. Oh how the tables have turned.
To “make room” for creativity, you have to physically make room, and this is what I mean by shifting the pressure to the right place. Instead of misplacing pressure on yourself to “think of” the perfect starting place or the exact right idea, shift the pressure to the space itself.
This is where my design process starts every time, and here’s how I do it.
The First Step to Removing Creative Blocks
The first thing you need to do if you’re really ready to remove your creative block is to clear the room — I’m talking down to bare bones. In the Foundry Formula styling process, the very first step we always take is Clearing Space and deep cleaning the physical room. It’s non-negotiable for DIY home styling.
Clearing everything in the room might sound drastic, but let’s talk about the why, then we’ll talk about the how.
Why Clear the Room
Removes visual blocks stopping you from seeing new possibilities
Opens up the room for you to imagine new layouts, colors, furniture, etc
Emotionally detaches you from familiar patterns
Mentally reduces physical clutter to improve clarity
Energetically ends the “I don’t know where to start” loop. You’ve started
Clearing space is not about minimalism, and you don’t need to get rid of everything you remove. This is the home styling version of hitting the reset button. Inside the Foundry Formula, we spend time sorting and categorizing everything so you feel confident keeping, storing or pitching, and most importantly, you feel confident taking control of your space.
So let’s talk about the most effective ways to do this.
How to Clear the Room
Allocate some time — an afternoon, a weekend or a month — just get it done
Remove everything to the best of your ability — make sure you tell everyone in the house the “why” behind this so they don’t think you’ve lost your marbles (or don’t and let them think what they want)
Deep clean EVERYTHING for a full energetic reset. I’m talking walls, windows, baseboards — pretend you’re moving in for the first time and really give the room some love and attention
Bring back what you plan to keep for sure, or at least keep for now
The Transformation has Begun
At this point, the energy has shifted. You’ve taken control, and the transformation is underway — that’s a huge win!!! You should celebrate because most people won’t do this. It is scary making such big changes at one time, and a familiar room suddenly feeling very empty is unsettling at best and panic-inducing at worst.
I want to warn you that you might feel genuinely weird. People in the house might complain about the emptiness or the changes, but this is where real alchemy lives — and not just in the home, but inside you.
I can’t speak for everyone, but most people, once they’re past the initial shock of the empty room, start to feel relief. They feel like they can breathe. They feel accomplished. And they feel more creative. Finally.
Ideas start to flow, inspiration finds them, and decisions come easier now that action has started and the purging of what no longer belongs in the room is underway.
What Comes Next
From here, the sky is the limit because the room is open and ready to receive changes, so this is where we start to plan. After clearing space, the second step we hone in on is creating a color palette for your new room. We immediately do this in Step 2 of the Foundry Formula because you have a clear view of everything: natural light, floors, fixtures, walls — we can actually make a plan for the room now.
By moving on to color second, we set up a filtering process for all of your decisions going forward. You won’t be guessing at what to buy, you’ll literally have a color-coded plan based on your ideas, yes, but also what already exists within the room.
The entire goal of the Foundry Formula style process is to streamline decisions and eliminate confusion so your ideas have somewhere to land. Instead of a flood of decisions, we funnel them into a gentle stream of choices, one coming after another.
What If I Can’t Redecorate all at Once?
Let me assure you: almost no one can. Most people are decorating in phases. Even though your home might feel bare bones for a few weeks or months, that’s better than making chaotic, impulsive decisions that keep you confused. Going slow with clarity will actually get you the results you want in the long run. When I was a bartender in college, the club owner taught me this (which I found out this week is actually a Navy Seal saying, but whatever 🤭): “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.” He was teaching me not to break glasses in the ice bin, but I’m telling you not to speed-run your decorating.
That’s why I created the Foundry Formula process — it’s for people who know what they like, but just can’t get it translate into their home. We walk through all 7 steps, making the right decisions at the right time, so by the time you’re finished, your home looks cohesive — and most importantly, it looks like you.
The Foundry Formula is self-paced, so you can work through it as your time and budget allows — enroll when you’re ready right here.
Whether or not you’re ready to start today, let’s at least keep in touch! Join our Alchemy Archive weekly newsletter, and I’ll send you a free Weekend Style Reset Guide to get you introduced to the full Foundry Formula process. Get that right here.
Let me know after you clear the space you’re working on. I’d love to hear how it goes and what’s coming next for you.
