Before & After

I had a fun opportunity last month to help a friend.  Andrea Dapkus, an interior designer here in Birmingham, called me on a Sunday night to say, “Hey, you know how E. is going in the hospital on Friday?”  “Yeah,” I said.  E. had a double mastectomy scheduled, having been diagnosed with breast cancer just six weeks prior.  “You and I are going to re-do her room for her.”

How could I resist?  E. is a sweet friend: a woman who gives everything to her family and community and rarely gives to herself.  Her bedroom decor is the last thing on her to-do list.  Correction:  it wasn’t even on her to-do list!

For the next five days, Andrea and I colloborated with Andrea as lead designer.  We scrambling to find new pieces of furniture and handymen who could install on Friday and Friday only!  We found people so generous, inspired by the story, who changed their schedules around and made things happen, so that when E. returned home on Saturday, her new room would be put together!  It was amazing, fun, and a complete whirlwind.  Andrea got to learn a thing or two about Feng Shui too!  (No, the cool blueprint art work of the Titanic would NOT work in their bedroom, which also happened to be the Money gua.  No sinking ships in the Money corner, please!). And I learned a lot from her as well.  (Okay, okay, the bronze bull can stay — hello, Ferdinand.)

On Friday morning at 6am, this is what the room looked like:

BEFORE:

 

And by 7pm, it looked like this:

 

Andrea did the detail work so that by Saturday, the mostly finished product looked like this:

E. was delighted, and she kept writing us texts on how she felt like she was living in a hotel, how it was the best place to come home to, etc.   After all, she was going to be spending weeks in that room in recovery.

I hope this is incentive for you to GIVE TO YOURSELF and put some love and time and energy into your space!  No one can deny the difference in the chi by looking at these Before and After photos.

NOTE:  Please know this is HIGHLY unusual for me to decorate a room without feedback from the client.  In Feng Shui, we spend a lot of time getting to know a client’s tastes and even their life goals before making changes.  However, because Andrea and I have both known E since childhood, and we had E.’s husband and mother in the mix too, this was a very rare exception to that very serious rule!