I had an unexpected thing happen on Facebook a few days ago. Some of you may not know that I have an Addicted 2 Decorating Facebook page where I mostly just share my latest blog posts, but I also try to add a few additional posts throughout the week. It may be a throwback to an old project, a random picture of a room in our home, or something else. (You can find me here if you want to follow along.)
In the past few years, I haven’t spent a whole lot of time on Facebook, mostly because I just don’t have the time, and the payoff for spending time on that Facebook page hasn’t been very high. I do read all of the comments and make it a point to interact with regular readers, especially if they ask questions. I do my best to answer all questions that people have, whether it’s here on the blog, on Facebook, or on Instagram. I probably don’t catch 100% of them, but I do try my best.
So about two weeks ago, I posted this picture, and asked, “Who did it better, me or ChatGPT?😀” with an explanation that the top is how I actually decorated our living room, and the bottom is how ChatGPT “decorated” my living room.
Most people preferred mine. A few preferred the ChatGPT version. A couple of people didn’t like either one. No big deal. It was just a fun, meaningless post.
But one comment caught my attention because the woman said she didn’t like my version of the living room because it wasn’t “cohesive”. I thought, wait. You can say a lot of things about my house. I get that my colors aren’t for everyone. I tend towards colors that most people would be afraid of in their homes (or so I thought), and I get that. But, not cohesive? I definitely think the colors in our house are cohesive. I’ve worked really hard to make them cohesive.
And then I realized that she was seeing (for the first time) one picture of one room from one angle, and that’s it. She probably just randomly happened upon that post in her Facebook feed and has never seen any other part of our house. That one photo is all she’s ever seen. And from that angle, you can’t really see the details of that room that I think make it cohesive.
So I put together another post, and this time I included 17 pictures of various rooms in our home. The post looks like this on a Facebook feed, and of course on Facebook, you can click on a picture and then click through all 17 pictures to see them much larger.
The point of the post wasn’t that everyone MUST love my hous😂 I really do understand that many people wouldn’t want these colors in their home. People aren’t required to like my house.
The whole point of the post was that sometimes you have to see a room from various angles, and in the larger context of the rest of the house, to see that it is cohesive. That’s it. That was my only point. And when seen from various angles, and in the larger context, I still contend that our house is very cohesive, even if I’ve decorated our home in colors that you abhor.
Well, my goodness, I had no idea that that post would take on a life of its own. It has been YEARS since I’ve had anything go close to “viral” on Facebook (and really, things don’t go “viral” today like they did a decade ago, so that’s probably not even a good word to use), but this post grew legs and ran. As of this morning, it had been viewed 1,457,545 times. It had received 13,698 reactions, comments, and shares. And it had gotten 249,619 clicks. Keeping up with all of the comments (again, because I like to at least try to answer as many questions as possible, which requires me to read through the comments) has felt like a full-time job in itself.
The main thing that shocked me about the response to that post was that the comments are overwhelmingly positive. I’d say about 99.9% of the comments were people expressing their love of what I had done in our home. That genuinely shocked me. I mean, we have lived through a decade of neutral farmhouse style dominating every medium imaginable, from TV to Instagram to magazines and more. I expected the response to our house to be at least 50/50 likes and dislikes. But that was not the case at all.
I was also very shocked that the overwhelming majority of comments were from people who liked my specific color palette that I used in our house. I mean, it’s one thing to like color in general, but it’s something altogether different to like the very specific color palette that I’ve used in our house. Again, I genuinely never would have expected it to appeal to such a large swath of people.
But do you know what that tells me? I think that people are color starved. And it’s obvious from reading through all of those comments. People are literally color starved. We’ve had all of these neutral interiors shoved at us for so long now, combined with the fact that so many people are simply afraid of adding color to their homes in fear of messing up, or ending up with a clown house, or fearing what a future buying might think, or dreading a day long in the future when they might have to actually repaint something, that they’ve just surrounded themselves with neutrals.
Some people genuinely love a neutral surrounding, and I totally get that. I do not doubt for one second that there are actually people who need completely neutral surroundings in their home. And I definitely understand that there are people who can appreciate photos of a home from a color lover like me, but who would feel nothing but anxiety all day every day if they actually had to live in my home. We’re all different. We’re all wired differently. Those different personalities and different temperaments require different surroundings to make us feel calm, peaceful, safe, and relaxed.
But I am 100% convinced that there are way too many people out there who have convinced themselves that they are “neutral” people when they’re not. For those people, that decision to surround themselves with nothing but neutral colors isn’t driven by a genuine internal need for calmness. It’s driven by fear. And that makes me sad.
Color is life, y’all! That’s why nature is FILLED with it! And when you bring color into your home, you breathe life into it. It doesn’t have to be flooded with color like my home is. And you certainly don’t have to decorate with the colors I’ve chosen. The colors I’ve used speak to me. Those colors that speak to me may be repellant to you. But I remain convinced that, with very few exceptions (and I do realize there are exceptions), most people have actual non-neutral colors that speak to them. Colors that they see, and that make them feel like they just want to drink it in. Those colors that make you feel that way should fill your home. Those are the colors you should be surrounding yourself with. Those are the colors that you should come home to at the end of a long day at work. Those are the colors that should fill that sanctuary called “home” — that respite that we all need from a crazy and chaotic world outside of those protective walls.
Decorating your home is about so much more than just filling it with the latest trends and the latest “color of the year.” That’s no way to decorate a home. While the whole neutral farmhouse trend was raging on for the last decade, I’ve been over here in my own home doing my own thing. And regardless of trends, regardless of what colors are deemed “popular” from one year to the next, I’ve ignored all of that, and I’ve created a home that makes me want to breathe it in every time I walk through the door.
I wish everyone had that. I want that for everyone. But that takes courage, and it requires putting away that fear. Find those colors that do that for you and fill your home with those. I promise you, it’s more than just decorating. It’s more than just making things pretty. It goes far beyond that in ways that probably even the most brilliant scientists, brain specialists, or psychologists can’t even fully explain. But just trust me on this. Do it, and you’ll see for yourself just how quality-of-life-changing it can be.
It starts with finding your colors. Not my colors. Not the “color of the year” from Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams. Not the colors that Southern Living or Architectural Digest tell you are the “it” colors for the year. But your colors. That color you’ve been drawn to all of your life. That color that you see, and you just want more of it. That color that makes you want to drink it in. That’s your color. Find it, go with it, and fill your home with it. Don’t worry about what others think about it. They don’t live there. Your home is for you.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
