Apartment Remodeling
Article • 683 Words • Interior Design, 2026 • 05/16/2026
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There are 699 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 4 minutes to read it.
This article was published 2026-05-16 00:00:00 -0400, which makes this post and me old when I published it.
“I am now pretty much done with my apartment. There is still some room for improvement, but any work will be minor.”
Little did I know…
One night I started to really think about my bedroom after climbing up to my loft bed and wasn’t able to fall asleep. While it started out as frustration of my heart rate spiking whenever I have to climb up to bed, it kind of spiraled into me realizing how much shit I had around my house and in my room.
I dictated a stream of consciousness note and one snippet really stands out to me reading it back, “my house was built for others i need energy boundaries and transitions and to not feel compressed”.
I wanted my apartment, but really my room more specfically, to feel like a sanctuary. I wanted to reclaim my space as somewhere that would regulate my nervous system and inspire me creatively.
In some ways, I feel like I strayed from my own interior design philosophy. I strongly felt like my house was designed for other people (because it was). For the past few years I’ve been really focused on hosting, but so far this year I haven’t hosted a single large event, which means that a lot of the design optimizations of my apartment had no use. Its the equivalent of carrying around dead weight for the possibility that you might need it even if you never reach for it.
- very performative i wanted to be less showy, more practical
- My bookshelves were just as much about signaling qualities about myself as they were storage devices. I had too many books that I was never going to read though and I convinced myself that I wanted to collect books like that to just hoard.
I don’t subscribe to the principles of feng shui necessarily, but I think the ideas of what it gets at with the psychology of design are really important truths to consider.
I wanted to feel grounded: low to the floor, less precarious, less claustrophobic.
- Eliminate visual noise and weight — less things and fewer shelves and other heavy, tall things
- I had so many different surfaces for display which meant that I had truly accumulated tons of stuff over the years. I also did so for the express reason of decorating which I felt like had served its purpose. These things had no inherent sentimental value to me, just that they had been in my house for so long.
- There were a lot of things that were off balance or leaning which felt precarious and unstable. This instability can make one feel nervous when really your home should soothe your nervous system.
- There are a lot of ingress points where there wasn’t a lot of space to move through when walking by which made you feel compressed and claustrophobic.
To this effect, in my bedroom I:
- Removed a bench
- Removed my papasan chair
- Moved my mattress from the loft bed to the ground
- I am currently using the loft bed frame almost like a four post bed frame now
- Moved in three bookshelves from dining room
- Removed track mounted shelves
- Got rid of two cheap floor lights and moved in different lamps from the kitchen/dining room
- Moved my laundry basket to the closet
- Removed a vinyl storage cabinet that was being repurposed as a side table/bookshelf
- Moved a coat rack out to the entryway
If you’re thinking, “Wow that’s a lot of stuff”, you’d be right! I think I got slowly used to the idea of having so much stuff in my room that when I took it all out I realized that I felt like I could breathe better and that my room felt way more spacious. I got rid of like five bags of stuff and gave it to the thrift store around the corner.
This remodel really taught me that nothing is truly ever finished and that while you might not be aware of it, things can be radically different after a small change in perspective.