Creating Home: Our Journey to The Hygge House
June 2016
We started DIY’ing and renovating right from the beginning of our marriage. We first moved to Palo Alto, CA where Lane was attending school and had a one bedroom apartment on Stanford Campus. This housing was the cheapest on campus and therefore our best, and really, only option. When we walked into the apartment for the first time, I had to hold back my tears. It was so unwelcoming and sterile; there was nothing“homey” about it. It felt like walking into an elementary school classroom. The flooring was industrial low profile carpet and linoleum and the lights were industrial florescent lights. Some furniture was provided by the school but, it also felt like furniture found in a classroom. I was discouraged to say the least, but as we started moving our stuff out of the U-Haul and into the apartment, I started to see some potential in our new 500 square foot home. It was in this first home that we started experimenting with building furniture and even started our first little Etsy business making wood home signs and named it Taylor Lane Co. Whenever I would point out where we lived everyone would say, “Oh, you’re the apartment with all the wood.” We had turned our small back porch into a wood shop in the middle of a college campus. It stuck out like a sore thumb. I worked hard to decorate our home seasonally and for holidays and loved having visitors. My love for home making and hosting developed in that space and I will always be proud of how we made that dismal apartment into a very sweet first home.
June 2018
After Lane graduated from Stanford, we moved to Woodside, CA in an over 100 year old gardeners cottage in the middle of the woods. We were very poor college students at that time and were blessed to find this housing. We had only ever seen the exterior before moving in and once we got the keys, we were greeted with light green carpet and surfaces that hadn’t been cleaned in a year. Friends and family helped us deep clean the entire house. We completed some small renovations and added some decorative touches and turned that sad looking shack into a quaint, cozy cottage. In the cottage I worked on my cooking and baking skills and Lane enjoyed capturing wildlife photography from our front porch.
We reminisce on our time nestled into the scenic Woodside hills and look back on that time with both fond and funny memories. Although beautiful, the cottage came with some strings. The first night we slept there the motion activated flood light came on at 3:00 am. I shook Lane awake and he grabbed a hammer and went to the window. Nothing was there and we assumed it was a deer walking through the yard; but that was only the first sign of how close we really were to wildlife. We had a family of rats living on the roof (possibly in the roof) and we would hear them scurrying across the ceiling all through the night. It completely creeped me out! We learned that rats are big fans of peanut butter and the traps kept them at bay, for the most part, and none ever came into the house. We also had some close calls with a mountain lion. The owners of the cottage lived in a home up the road and saw a 300 pound mountain lion jump our fence just minutes after Lane had been working on the car out in the front driveway. It then came back the next night and perched on a tree on the property for a few hours. From then on, we would bang pots and pans every time we went outside. Last but not least, a mama mouse gave birth to two baby mice in the glove box of our car. This happened without my knowledge and when attempting to pull out a napkin from the glove box in a Trader Joes parking lot, I ended up grabbing mama mouse in my hand. The babies fell out of the box and the mom ran away. A lady in the parking lot heard my screams and helped me get the babies out of my car. It was horrific to say the least.
June 2020
We loved our time in the Bay Area but, when we found out I was pregnant we knew it was time to head home to Arizona. We purchased our townhome in June of 2020 and moved in September 2020 after renovating the house. We removed honey from the ceiling and walls of our sons bedroom, replaced all the flooring in the house, painted all the walls, reworked the living room fireplace and entertainment unit and upgraded the entire kitchen. We continue to work on projects almost everyday to make this home reflect our style and function for our family’s current stage of life.
I love seeing how my style and design sense has evolved and improved over time and how Lane has developed and fine-tuned a range of handyman skills. This is just the beginning for us. Dreaming up ideas for our home and making a reality those dreams is something we have enjoyed doing together from the start. We make a great team and work together to make beautiful, functional and meaningful spaces for our family.
The Hygge House
