I’m Taylor Morrow. Welcome to The Homeio!
The Chair I Almost Threw Away
Nine years ago, I put a chair out on the curb in front of my apartment building. It had good bones and terrible fabric, the kind of thing you’d walk past a hundred times without really seeing it.
I walked past it too, until my neighbor Marion May dragged it back inside, took a box cutter to the cushion, and showed me the frame underneath was solid oak. She reupholstered it that weekend.
I’ve thought about that chair more than I probably should. It’s the reason The Homeio exists, and it’s the reason I stopped believing that good taste means buying everything new.
Why I Started Paying Attention To Rooms
I didn’t grow up thinking about rooms. I grew up in apartments where nothing on the walls was meant to be permanent, so nobody bothered hanging much of anything. That changed slowly, one lease at a time.
Between 22 and 28, I lived in five apartments across three states, and I decorated every single one, including the one with a lease that specifically prohibited paint. I painted it anyway, then repainted it back to the color it came in before I moved out. My old landlord still doesn’t know.
Marion May’s chair sat in my living room for three more years after she fixed it. Somewhere in that stretch, I started noticing things I’d never paid attention to before. How a room shifts when you swap the hardware on an old dresser.
How much one good lamp does that an overhead fixture never will. I started keeping a notebook of paint colors. The notebook became a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet eventually became a blog that almost nobody read for the first eight months.
What Actually Qualifies Me To Tell You Any Of This
I’m not an interior designer with a framed degree on the wall. What I have is time spent doing the work. For four years, I freelanced as a home stager for two real estate agents in my city, prepping empty houses for listing photos on turnarounds as short as two days.
I signed up for a weekend upholstery course at a community studio on a whim, and I’ve since finished eleven pieces of furniture, all curb finds or estate sale leftovers nobody else wanted.
One winter, I volunteered at a furniture restoration nonprofit, mostly sanding, and it taught me more about wood grain and joinery than any article I’d read up to that point.
None of that makes me the last word on anything. It does mean that when I write about a technique on this site, I’ve usually done it myself, more than once, and gotten it wrong at least once before I got it right.
A Few True Things About Me
- I keep a spreadsheet of every paint color I’ve used in every room I’ve lived in, with the brand, the exact name, and whether I’d buy it again. Most get marked no.
- I own eleven drinking glasses, and none of them match. I buy them one at a time from thrift stores because I like that each one came from somewhere different.
- I repainted my current living room’s accent wall four times in eighteen months before landing on a clay color I probably should have picked first.
- Marion May’s chair is still with me. It sits in my office now, reupholstered a second time in a fabric I definitely overpaid for.
What You’ll Actually Find Here
- Small spaces and rentals: what to do when you can’t paint, can’t drill into a wall, and can’t afford to start from zero.
- Secondhand and restoration: how to look at a curb find or a thrift store piece and tell whether it’s worth the weekend.
- Color and paint: honest accounts of colors that worked, colors that didn’t, and why the swatch always lies a little.
- Budget styling: what’s genuinely worth the money and what you can skip without anyone noticing.
Important Note:
If you want to know how we create content, From Idea to published articles, source verification, and quality, or anything else regarding this, please visit our Editorial Guidelines Policy
How I Keep This Place Honest
Everything I publish gets checked against current information before it goes live, and I read back through older posts on a regular basis to fix anything that’s changed, whether that’s a product that got discontinued or a method I’ve since found a better way to do.
Nothing gets posted without a real read-through for accuracy, not just a spell check. If something on this site includes an affiliate link or a paid partnership, I mark it clearly, right where you’d see it, not tucked into a footer nobody scrolls to. I’d rather lose a partnership than lose your trust in what I tell you to buy.
If You’re Renting, Starting Over, Or Just Stuck
This site is for anyone furnishing a life they don’t fully control yet. A rental with strict rules. A first house with nothing left in the budget after the down payment. A room you’ve meant to fix for two years and haven’t.
I’m not going to point you toward a four-hundred-dollar lamp. Most of what I recommend here costs under fifty dollars, or nothing at all, because that’s the world I decorated in for most of my twenties.
If your space still feels unfinished, that’s rarely a taste problem. It’s usually a time and information problem, and that’s the actual thing I’m here to help with.
Marion May’s chair is still in my office, by the way. I look at it most days. It’s a decent reminder that most things worth having are worth fixing first.
Come find me at [email protected] if you want to say Heyyyyy.
Regards, Taylor Morrow
