let's talk about restoring_sean, llc

I own a company.

Surprise!

I could just end the blog here and mosey along but no, oh no, I've got things to say. And while yes, I do say most of them in the YouTube video at the bottom of this page... the one that'll take you right to my shiny new YouTube channel where you are MORE than welcome to subscribe... it wouldn't be me if I didn't write a bunch of it out too.

So, hello, I am me and this is who I am, and I now own a company called restoring_sean, llc.

Doing this (as in starting an interior design company, a YouTube channel, the instagram account, and subsequently putting myself out there more than I ever have before), boils down to three main points of interest:

     - I've always been someone who loves to share a story 

     - I've always been drawn to design

     - I've always loved the "behind-the-scenes" of how something came together

With all three of those points combined, not only am I Captain Planet, but it also only took me 38 years to figure out what I wanted to do with it. I think to explain how I came to it, let's start at the beginning.

1. Sharing Stories

Four years old and showcasing a flair for dramatics

I asked my mom the other day, at what age did I start coming up with stories? And not necessarily ones based on fact, but maybe... if I spent time with Melanie Burgner down the street, how did I recount that time? Were there some whoppers you detected because I was giving too many details? She couldn't remember me lying (I was good at it), but she said I was probably in the 4-year range. 

Sidebar though, she reminded me that Melanie and I would paint rocks and then go door-to-door selling them down the street, so I guess the entrepreneur Capricorn in me was always ready to make a buck.

By elementary school, once I knew how to read and write proficiently, I loved doing a good book report. What was MY take on the story? 

What picture could I draw to go with it? 

How much could I impress the teacher with my spin on things and creative flair? Usually, it was a lot, though you could also attribute that to being a teacher's pet and always needing people to like me even from a young age, but we're not going to get into that here because it's probably something best left for therapy whenever I decide to go back but I feel like I'm getting off-topic and perhaps sharing a little too much about my inner thoughts and issues and maybe I should just get back to how I tell stories unless you count this as telling a story in which case hello and you're welcome.

10 years old, with a bowl-cut and snazzy soccer uniform

Now, let me be clear on something, I was a total liar as a kid. It was never to be malicious by any means, but DAMN did I love telling a story (usually based on truth) and elaborating on it to the point of (what I hoped) people saying "Holy smokes, what an amazing experience you had!" And I'd nod and think "hell yeah I did," and I'd sometimes tell these stories so frequently that I even started to believe them myself. 

I don't think it was because my life was boring, I just didn't know where to aim that energy of the fantasy world running through my brain at all times.

The wealth of fantasy dried up when my family moved to Wisconsin in 1997, and it stayed dry for a long time. I don't assign that blame to anyone; I think it was just a growing period for me, and in some ways, it was time to put away childish things. I didn't have the kids around me anymore that I'd grown up with, so expressing that silly side (playing Power Rangers in the backyard and getting to be the Pink Ranger, specifically) simply evaporated for a few years. 

Two and a half years, to be precise.

October 1999

Because then I met Katie. 

And through Katie, my fantastical imagination was sparked. Not immediately, but within 8 months, my energy turned to writing what would be the first of four books in "The Onyxus Chronicles" series. I know I praise her a lot for this, but really, it was our conversations about nerdy things like being witches and loving science fiction and fantasy adventures and all the things... it was those conversations that ignited the creativity in my mind and turned me down the path of sharing stories differently.

Towards the end of 2011, I started the blog for Musings of a Self-Proclaimed Author (named partly out of spite for someone telling me all the things I wasn't) because I needed an outlet to share things about my life. I needed to get what felt like the world off my chest, and in doing so, felt it would start moving me in a direction far away from who I was and toward who I wanted to be. 

Which was someone honest. 

Not that the little toe-head liar was still a big part of my life, of course, but I had just exited a toxic relationship where he (and I) both did fair amounts of lying. For my own part, that lying led to more than a fair amount of heartache, and because of it, I instead wanted to pursue a life led by truth. 

Truth first, and absolutely no lies in the blog. 

Ever. 

And I've stood by that because with a certain humorous approach and maybe some soul-crushing insight into my experiences, that's entertaining enough for people to read. I don't need to lie about things that didn't happen, life is thrilling on its own.

August 2014

Fourteen years to the day after starting my book in a red spiral Mead notebook, I was a published author. A year later I released Episode II, two years later came Episode III, and then after another five whole years came Episode IV to wrap it all up. There were more blogs peppered along the way... outlining my moves from Wisconsin to Texas, then Texas to Minnesota, then buying my first house... then my second... and then a move from Minnesota to Wisconsin. 

And now here we are, and now you know about me telling stories. The real ones (blogs) and the fantasy ones (the books).

2. Passion for Design

My SWEET (...) bedroom in 1999; notice the super advanced computer I started writing my book series on

As a kid, I was a big fan of rearranging my bedroom. A BIG fan. Once my older sister Megan got me started on it, I was hooked, and I'd screw around moving my furniture almost every month. Something could always be made to look "better"; you could slap some puffy paint on an alarm clock to dress it up, or use your markers on a lampshade! 

Artwork? Hang it! Don't like where it is? Move it, hang it again!

Don't worry about the 800 million pin-holes you're leaving in the wall! Who cares?

But this was how it was, from roughly age 7 onwards. It definitely picked up when we moved to Wisconsin (and, as previously said, I didn't have as many friends to occupy my time as I did back in California). It was also a bit of a new world because I could have a TV in my room and the old family computer, and that meant there were spaces for entertaining (me and whatever friends came by to watch something from my comprehensive VHS library).

The routine was that I'd silently (or loudly) rearrange my room, and when it was done (re: a showstopper), I'd get my mom to line up outside my door. I'd hold out my hand and say "Tickets, please," and she'd place an imaginary ticket in my hand, then I'd whip open the door and reveal the grand reimagining of my bedroom. She'd smile and laugh and nod, and then go about her day. I'd be left feeling fulfilled and with a sense of accomplishment.

My bedroom circa 2002/2003 in super-trendy red

As the years went on and I grew up a bit, my focus turned to painting my room. I "helped" my mom paint my (new to me) bedroom as a Freshman in high school, and then I repainted it two years later. And again, two years later. And once again, like... three years later. 

I was hooked.

Same room, same wall, circa 2005

Please Note: I'm not showing these pictures for the sake of "trust me, I know what I'm doing!" I'm showing them for the sake of "hey, I've been doing this for 28+ years and clearly I've (thankfully) only gotten better."

It wasn't just an instance of "I'm tired of this color and don't want to look at it anymore." It was that I wanted the entire vibe to change. Usually, paint was the easiest way to do that, but when I was older and working (and inhaling credit-card debt, admittedly), it meant I could achieve those fresh vibes for a room through new furniture, too.

When I got away from clothing retail and working for Express, I began my journey with Pottery Barn. I'd lived on my own for a bit by then, but my sense of "taste" hadn't really turned into much other than what it always had been; putting trinkets (lots of glass bottles) around, occasionally some framed stuff, and when I could, adding new lighting. And candles... gotta have those candles.

Pottery Barn changed that.

I started learning through work that there needed to be a method to the madness. Sure, you could like a vibe, but what was the actual theme that would aim you toward the vibe? And how would you achieve that in your space, re-using what you HAVE and not necessarily replacing everything? I learned there was a reason behind everything, primarily using thought and intention. And sometimes, the answer didn't come immediately; it needed to be researched. 

At this point in time (2012), Pinterest had become a thing, and it was such a huge catalyst for change in the design industry. Suddenly, design felt accessible, y'know? What you used to have to hunt down through catalogs and watch on television shows, you could now search for on Pinterest and be shown a million variations of the thing you wanted to see. 

Anyway.

A few years later, I started buying houses, and we all know how that went. 

With my first house, The Manor, I was very vocal about my work. I shared photos along the way and, every now and then, a video to reveal something exciting about the design. I wanted everyone to see and marvel at it all, mainly due to the significant changes from what the space (whatever space it was) had been before, and what it was now. 

It was rearranging my bedroom on a grand scale, having the power and ability to share that with the world... but consistently backing away from going full-tilt because I always... for whatever reason... felt like it didn't matter. 

The Estate design board

Before I knew it, I was 37 years old and drawing up a massive design plan for my newest house in a software system. I devised a plan encompassing every Sherwin Williams paint color for the house, telling a color story that would move through the rooms, back to front, and then upstairs to finish it off. I developed curated themes for each room, coming up with the small, whimsical details that I wanted to not necessarily hide in them, but to place and leave for people to find and hopefully notice when they visited.

It was in the last few months that I started to realize this was the direction I wanted my ventures to turn toward, designing not just for myself but for others as well. And why for others? 

Well... that's because suddenly I felt like a kid again, standing at the door, asking for "tickets, please."

3. Show and Tell

The Estate's kitchen when I purchased the home

I love the process, and I love talking about the process, and I love sharing what the process looks like. But it's not really fun to write about in blogs, because something is lost in translation, y'know? So I shared the stories with the people I see in real life. And while up til (mostly) now, the work has all been for me, in the last few months, it has also been for other people. As friends get more comfortable with asking these questions (rather than the "oh, you'd be willing to help me with that?" but more of "Say, can you help me with this room?"), I get more and more determined to want to do this. 

Part of my joy with renovating spaces and restoring them to some form of glory, even if not the exact form they had originally been in, is seeing something come to life again.

After working at Pottery Barn for 10 years, I knew that everyone having or controlling that vision for their own space simply didn't exist. It just doesn't. Even in my own family, I remember watching how frustrated my mom would get when they were designing the details of their own home because she couldn't picture how it would all look in the end. And that's not a bad thing, being unable to envision it, because it allows people like me to come in and show.

The Estate's kitchen a year after I purchased

To me, the final 'look' of a space is only as good as the amount of work it took to get it there. Not every room will be a "gut it to the studs" project, I know, but nothing is ever as simple as "slap some paint on it and BOOM, done!" either. 

It takes more than that, and I'm so excited after 6 years of taking pictures and videos of my houses to be able to talk about it more in-depth, to have a forum to do so, and to have it all organized in a way that I can tell a coherent story, from start to finish (at least with two of the houses).

And as for the YouTube portion of this, in what should be considered a surprise to no one, I love being on camera. We know that.

I was an early adopter of selfies in 2006 when MySpace changed everything. Shortly after, I created the multiples, filmed a year of my life, and tried (in vain) to create a video blog back in 2013. Then, I turned the multiples into video form. Then I got real big into Instagram, and on and on and on. I'm comfortable being on camera... call it the storyteller that was always looking for an audience or the youngest of 3 that was always trying to get the most attention. Combining my love for stories with my passion for design and my need to show how I do what I do makes sense to do it in front of a camera.

So, getting down to brass tacks here. Owning restoring_sean is a two-faceted entity: 

1. A YouTube channel devoted not only to the three houses I have owned, renovated, and restored but also to my continuing work in design as time moves forward.

2. An interior design company that I can use for working to help prospective clients.

I have worked toward the YouTube channel for a decade now, but never really figured out a format (or reason) to get it off the ground. There had been a brief moment in time when I thought I was making the transition to video blogs instead of these written ones, but that crashed and burned with all the other off-the-cuff ideas I had conjured in the past. The difference between then and now is that I HAVE a purpose and reason for doing it, and it's one I think people will enjoy. 

And I don't mean that people will enjoy it because it's me on camera, not by any means. I believe you'll enjoy it because people tend to love the before and after process of home remodeling, and I think I can inject a certain amount of levity and humor into it as I go along. Once we are "caught up" with present-day work on the house (I have roughly a year of content before that happens, though), then it will turn to more DIY projects, possibly client projects, and who knows what else in the grand scheme of things? 

I don't want to put too tight of a bow on this project because it will evolve and change a bit, as all of them tend to do.

For the interior design end of things, that's a little different, as it is the 'literal' business side, and it's a full-service job, too. It begins with the consultation process, then moves to the space-planning tool (like an aerial 3D map of the space I'm designing) and mood board based on what we discussed for the project and where I think it should go. Beyond that, it's project management, but that depends on the scale of what is going on (sourcing contractors, permits, installations, shopping for product/decor, additional needs of the client).

And then, in addition to the design end, is the installation services portion. Need a gallery wall hung? Shelves? Drape rods? Need a room painted, fireplace mantle built, lights installed, cabinet hardware changed, new furniture built, rooms re-arranged? I'll do it, usually with a smile (one that required braces twice, thanks) on my face. 

There is a whole menu of services I offer and if you need something done that I either cannot do, or simply won't (don't ask me to do plaster work), I will find you the person who can. Conversely, if you need installation services outside what I offer, I'm certainly open to talking about it.

The future feels bright with restoring_sean, and I feel very optimistic. That alone is a really great feeling, when a large portion of the last several years has just... not been that.

Currently, there is no website, but eventually there will be as I become more established in this arena. I need to pound the pavement, so to speak, and get some more work under my belt that isn't just my own housework. That's when I'll feel comfortable launching that portion of the equation. Trust me, though, it'll come.

Because in the end... it has all come to this. Everything over the last few decades has slowly funneled toward what I want to do with my life, and that's so awesome. I still want to be a world-famous author, sure. And I still want to be discovered by a talent scout while shopping at Target and be put in an Oscar-winning movie, of course. But this is a bit more attainable right now, and ultimately, it's something I enjoy.

Frankly, it's something I'm good at.

So, with ALL of that being said, below is the very first video from my YouTube channel: Episode 1 - Introductions. I will post new videos every Wednesday going forward, with additional content appearing on the @restoring_sean Instagram page (typically content related to the video for that week). There will also be random updates and special videos drawing light to specific events in life or that pertain to the current discussion. The point is, content is coming (after promising it for over a year and a half), and I'm really, truly, very excited to share it.

Until then... click like and subscribe. Let's be friends on this new journey together (c: