Queen of Nesting

Myquillyn Smith’s do-it-yourself
home décor made her a blog sensation

by Lori K. Tate   photography by Laurie Martin

 

As you walk through Myquillyn Smith’s Huntersville home, it’s easy to think that she either went to some prestigious design school or hired an interior designer who went to a prestigious design school. Dig a little deeper and you’ll discover that neither is the case.

Instead, Smith, whose do-it-yourself design savvy has been featured in Cottages & Bungalows, Ladies Home Journal and most recently Better Homes & Gardens Do It Yourself issue, has a natural talent for taking diamonds in the rough and making them, well diamonds. This is a woman who successfully uses wooden logs for an entry table and sheets from Ollie’s for bedroom curtains. Everything in her home has a story, and Smith happily shares is on her blog called Nesting Place

We recently met with her (in her own nest) to find out how Nesting Place came about.

 

When did you start writing your blog?

My husband and I had just moved to Charlotte. We moved from Greensboro, where my sister is a writer. She had a blog. My dad actually started a blog in the dark ages when no one else had a blog. So he was the first one, and my sister and I kind of made fun of him. Then she started one, and then I moved away from her and was lonely and read her blog. Then I found Pioneer Woman. I thought gosh, it would be fun to be able to leave her a comment. I really just started a blog so I could be part of the community, you know make connections. I had a little business in Greensboro, and I called it Nesting Place. I did redesign. I did tassles, sold little things. It was a little arts and crafts type of thing. So that’s why I grabbed the name. I thought I’ll just call it Nesting Place, and I’ll call myself The Nester. I didn’t want to use my real name.

 

Your whole mantra is, “It doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.” Talk about that.

Well, I love that. Sometimes I think that’s why the blog has gotten the audience that it has. Because all of us, including me more than anyone, needs to hear that it’s okay to have people over even if your house isn’t all the way ready or there’s a stain on the carpet. Just enjoy what you have, even if it’s not your dream house. It’s never going to be the dream house. You’re never living in your dream house. If you spend your whole life waiting for that, it’s really a big waste. We talk about getting past that a lot on my blog.

I do do-it-yourself things, but the heart and soul of Nesting Place is that constant encouragement to try it anyway, to do it anyway, to risk it anyway, even if you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Move the chairs around just to see what’s going to happen because what’s the worst that can happen? Even if you make a nail hole, you can fill it in later.

 

I get what you’re saying, if you spend your whole life waiting for it to be perfect then you’re missing your life.

You are. I love pictures, and I love the magazines, but I think a lot of us spend so much time looking at those pretty pictures that we think that that’s the goal, and it’s not. Our house is where we live. Even with you coming over here, I mopped the floors because the floors were grotesque, but I thought what’s the worst that can happen. You can figure out that we live here, which we do, which is wonderful. The house is here to serve us. We’re not here to serve the house.

 

I read somewhere that you should make sure there’s one thing that’s not perfect in your house so your guests won’t hate you when they come over.

It’s true because I think imperfections set people at ease. I don’t feel comfortable when I’m in a perfect house. All I think about is myself. Do I touch this? Is that okay? I don’t want to spill my drink. To be able to just embrace those imperfections is freeing for everyone.

 

Do you know how many people follow your blog? Is there any way to know that?

Well, yes. I have a subscriber count and there’s different ways. …There are about 36,000 people who follow Nesting Place to the point where they say I either want to get it e-mailed to me or that subscribe to it. I also have a little over 200,000 people a month that will stop by my blog. The beautiful thing is that they’re all over the world. That’s the great thing about the Internet.

 

Did you have any idea when you started this that it would be become so big?

Oh no. I didn’t even know I would like to write. I just thought, ‘I’ll put up some pretty pictures and maybe write a few sentences about houses.’ I still don’t think that I love the art of writing that much. …I always pretend like I’m talking to my sister. I always just follow behind the tagline that it doesn’t have to be perfect, and that kind of covers a multitude of things.

 

How often do you change your home?

A lot. Sometimes I think, ‘Why can’t I just be okay?’ I change it all the time. Everything, even the sofa, has been in different rooms. I always did it even before I had a blog. It was just fun for me. It was a free way to get a different look and have a change and just to see if stuff will work better. My husband grew up in a house where the furniture stayed the same way all the time, never was moved, which is fine.

 

Your house really reflects where you are in your life.

You can look at that as a pain, but for whatever reason, I look at it as really fun. It’s a free thing. I would much rather move that dresser around to 10 different places in the house than buy a different piece of furniture.

 

I love the idea of doing the thrift thing or Habitat Restore.

Everything in here was bought that way. I think the only piece of real furniture is the sofa.

 

What do you enjoy about home design? Didn’t you drop out of design school?

I did four years of college, all the way up to my student teaching, and then I figured out if I’m going to be a teacher I’m going to have to do homework at night and teach. I didn’t want to do that. I ended up getting married. My husband was in Florida at the time, so I thought, ‘I’ll just go ahead and stay in school and do my fifth year and start something fresh.’ So I did a year at a community college of design school and loved and hated it at the same time. I loved a lot of the work, but I didn’t like the pretend scenarios because we didn’t have a lot of boundaries, and I just remember thinking in real life there will be more budgets and more boundaries. It was just kind of too open-ended, but overall I loved it. It was a great experience. I did do a week course in staging and redesign, so I’m certified in that if that means anything, which I don’t think it does.

 

In your house what would you say is your biggest splurge?

Different things. My husband wants whatever bed we have to be in good shape, not falling apart, not creaky, that kind of thing, so I always make sure we have a nice bed. The sofa at the time was a splurge. We had it custom ordered, and it has been the best sofa in the world. It’s 10 years old. I’ve had it recovered and slip covered, and I’ll probably do that again.

Most of the things on my wall are handmade because I’m not a big Kirkland’s person. I won’t just buy something for the wall. My mirror is from Bebe Gallini’s. Over here I have pictures.

I grew up with grandparents who had a sailfish on the wall, and I have wanted a sailfish for a long time. I finally started looking at them, and they were $800 or $900. And to ship a sailfish, it’s crazy because they’re huge. We ended up finding one of Craig’s List. A guy on Lake Norman was selling it. It was from the 1960s, he caught it off the coast of Bimini and had it in his basement for a long time. He was moving or something. It was only $300, but to me that was a big splurge for something to hang on my wall because usually I’m so thrifty about hanging stuff on my wall. It’s probably one of my favorite things. I love it.

 

How do you come up with these ideas for your home?

I think the biggest thing is that I don’t have a lot of money to work with. That used to be the thing I would curse because you think, ‘I have such great taste if only I had an unlimited budget I could do whatever .’ I really look at that now. I’ve been a wife for 18 years, and it was not until I was just able to embrace that and say, ‘Okay, this is what I have to work with, let me do the best with what I have and get creative.’ Really if you have an unlimited budget, unlimited choices, unlimited everything, it’s impossible to start.

We live in a rental so there’s only so much I can do in the house. I can’t paint the cabinets. I’m not going to do major overhauls for a place we’re in temporarily. I call it Lovely Limitations. I did a 31-day series on Lovely Limitations because over time I realized it was the limitations that allowed me to be creative, and I think that’s a big part of the creative process. …Instead of being mad about that, and I say that from my own experience, it’s actually a nice gift.

 

So part of the inspiration is that you have a finite amount of money that you can spend. What else do you do?

I’m on Pinterest a lot. I get Southern Living and Better Homes & Gardens, but I don’t do as much with magazines now because I am online a lot. I have a community of other home bloggers that I’m really close with, so I’ll read their blogs. I don’t even know where I get my inspiration. I think a lot of it is that I’m not the kind of person who will go out looking for something. If I’m at the Goodwill, and my budget is pretty good and I see something for $10 I’ll get it. I can do that without knowing where it’s going to go. …Most of the things in the house I did not know where they would go when I bought them, and it’s kind of like my own little adventure to figure out the best place.

 

What’s one of your favorite things you’ve done in your house?

One of my favorite things is my plate wall with just random yard sale plates and some we registered for. I’ll just hang them up and put interesting shapes together. I love that, and anyone can do it. I also like my page wreath. I had seen them online forever, and I thought, ‘That’s cheesy, that’s dumb,’ and then I had a signing party for my sister, and I wanted to do all this book page stuff. That was two years ago, and I love it. I also made a book garland. I love walking into Anthropologie. I love to shop there, but when I go there, I’m looking at all of their displays. A lot of times it’s the things that I think won’t turn out well. Really what that means is that it’s the riskiest stuff.