Get a Harder Life, Georgie

My kids are very fascinated with Substack. Born capitalists, they’re honestly fascinated with anything that makes money. Donate lemonade stand money to a local charity? Not the Sabbe kids.

My middle son has spent weeks trying to convince me to loan him money to start a vending machine business. “I’m going to write a speech and read it to you,” he’s said repeatedly, to which I reply, “I don’t want a speech. I want a business plan.” I have a strong feeling his efforts may end there. He’s not passionate about vending machines, and if I teach my children anything about chasing a profession, it’s to chase a passion, not a bank account.

But back to Substack. From the backseat of the car yesterday, my oldest declared to his younger sister, “Get a harder life, Georgie. Then you can make money on Substack.” It was a bit of a gut check for me. I found myself wondering, am I bastardizing the harder aspects of my life to gain a readership? I quickly decided no. That didn’t feel right. I truly enjoy telling stories, and the only stories I have to tell are the ones I’ve lived.

But then, without thinking, I replied to his comment with, “You’re right. People would probably rather I write about design.”

That conversation led me to take a deeper dive into why I, although very confident in the way I approach design, have never felt led to share design advice. It’s not just here. I’ve all but stopped replying to magazine editors who reach out asking for “three hot trends for laundry rooms in 2026” type blurbs. Which is crazy, because people hire publicists just to get included in those roundup articles. But when those emails hit my inbox, I have found that I immediately recoil.

I believe my field to be a beautiful craft, an art form of sorts, but an art form with longevity. An art form that does not follow trends or the opinions of others. An art form that does not teach you to hate what you love, but instead to love what you have.

Not another trauma story, I promise, but my great-grandmother, Mae, lived in a mobile home. She had knickknacks everywhere, plates on the walls, and a mirage of mismatched sofas alongside a pair of velvet-esque recliners. Her house would never adorn the pages of a design magazine, but my Grandma Mae was so very house-proud.

My grandma Georgie, like me, took forever to finish her home, or I’m honestly not even sure it was ever finished. Widowed in her early thirties, her renovations often involved the help of one of her adult sons. Once, there was a feud in the holler where she lived that very much slowed down her renovation goals. You can Google “holler” if you’re unfamiliar.

There was a dispute over land that pitted my grandmother’s children against her sister Grace’s children, all of them literal next-door neighbors. My uncle, a Navy veteran who often helped my grandmother renovate and maintain her house, was receiving disability checks from the government following a back injury. During this conflict over land, my aunt’s daughter Angel, a lesbian with a salt-and-pepper mullet who I am positive could win a fistfight with most any man, began filming my uncle with a camcorder while he helped my grandmother around her house. I believe he was assisting with roof repairs at the time.

Angel threatened to mail the videos to the government so my uncle would lose his disability benefits if he didn’t agree to sign over the land to her side of the family. I could not make any of this up if I tried.

Point being, my Grandma Georgie, just like my Grandma Mae, was house-proud.

With plastic carpet runners on the floors and the occasional bedsheet over the sofa, my grandmothers cherished their homes, and I cherished the memories made inside them. When I sit down every day to do my job, I think of them.

And so, no, I am not going to spend my time telling people that “gray is out.” I am not, and never want to be, in the business of stealing your joy, which is what so many design articles inadvertently do.

I will always remember around 2010, when chevron took over the home décor scene, and then less than a year later every headline declared, “Chevron is out.” In my head, I pictured a middle-aged woman married to a Midwest farmer who had just convinced him to let her spend a little money to spruce up their living room. And what had she purchased? A pair of chevron pillows, of course.

God, I thought, don’t let her read these articles.

A decade later, I did the exact same thing when I declared on Instagram that vinyl siding was gross. How many thousands of people were perfectly happy with the exterior of their homes until I pointed out my disdain for manufactered metal cladding?

Even pointing out what I consider the “right way” to detail things like built-in millwork or interior door and window casing seems unkind. How many eyes will be ruined to their own newly renovated homes that they once reveered as perfect before reading my words.

The joy this platform brings me is immeasurable. The fact that people subscribe to read what I write is unfathomable. But I write all of this to ask, knowing the why behind what I do not write, what would you like me to write more of?