WoF: Tell us about a typical day in the life of Laurie Smith.

LAURIE: I’m kind of at the point where there really isn’t one. If I’m in town, the only consistent two days are Sunday, because of church, and Monday, because of my noon Bible study. Of course, there’s always the carpool line, dealing with correspondence and email, and doing some interviews like this one. Of course, if I’m shooting Trading Spaces, which I do about once a month, it’s all crazy shopping and decorating in 48 hours!

WoF: With all your activities (plus a toddler!), you must stay busy. How do you make time for God?

LAURIE: All of us have such hectic, fast-paced lives. I’m in a Bible study with ten incredible women. While we’re not all doing the same thing (some work, others don’t, but we’re all mothers), we’re all at the phase of life where it’s ninety to nothing and it just doesn’t stop. We talk about it all the time. Right now we’re doing a Bible study series called “Living Prayer” by Maxie Dunnam. It’s a great study; one thing I’ve walked away with is when Maxie talks about how “It is important to pray our lives rather than say our prayers.” Prayer shouldn’t be a burden. It’s really opened a door to me to say, “I’m driving down the street and I’m going to chat with God right now.” Another great quote from the study is, “The goal of prayer is a life of friendship and fellowship with God, cooperation with God’s Spirit, and living God’s life in the world.”

WoF: At what part in the renovation process did you decide to write a design book about your home?

LAURIE: At the very beginning. I had been approached about writing a book; at first was I was like, No, there are too many design books out there already. I didn’t want to put something out there that was just more of the same.
Brad and I were not looking for a new home, but our friends were living in this house and were moving to Dallas so they offered us the chance to buy their house. We loved the street and thought it might be forever before another house was available on that street. I took a lot of ‘before’ pictures for me, and as I started keeping a design journal I started thinking, Huh, this could be a fun book. The more I started looking at design books in marketplace ? I’m a design book junkie ? I realized I’d never really seen one that told the story of only one home. I felt it could be something neat. I was having lunch with Patsy Clairmont while this was all coming about and talked to her about the idea. She really encouraged me to go for it. It was a lot of work going through the process, but now that it’s done I’m really glad I did it.

WoF: What’s it like to know that anyone who opens the book can see inside your home? Is that scary at all, or do you just love your place so much that it’s fun to share it?

LAURIE: The thing is, I wasn’t going to write about something that I wasn’t passionate about ? and like almost everyone, I’m passionate about my own home. My husband and I became so entrenched in the process that I thought it was an interesting story to tell. We went in to this and it was NOT our dream house. It wasn’t love at first sight. I think it’s like with human relationships ? the more you nurture and give to a relationship, the more you love that relationship. We found ourselves pouring so much energy into this house that it became our baby and we decide we do love it. Peeling away layers and letting the house breathe was a really thrilling process.

WoF: You did some major construction on your place – moving walls, adding windows, things like that. How long did the whole process take?

LAURIE: The amazing thing is, we never really ripped out walls; we added some, which was strange, but we extended door heights and extended windows. But it shouldn’t have taken as long as it did; there was a lot of touch and go.
When we moved in the first time, I was having the duct work cleaned out after all the renovation. They do it from the outside so it doesn’t billow out in the house. I was watching my sofa walk by [into the house] when the man cleaning the ducts said, “Miss Laurie, I have something to tell you…” I thought, How bad can it be? Then he said, “Your insulation is in the duct work and it has probably not been changed since 1949 when the house was built. Now you have rampant black mold. The only solution is to replace all the ductwork in the house.” It was a nightmare. Brad and I were sitting out front on the steps that night just in shock. We basically had to renovate the house twice. We didn’t have a choice; even if we wanted to sell the house, nobody would buy it if it was full of black mold. That’s the point when it became a money pit.

WoF: You live in Jackson, Mississippi. Did Hurricane Katrina do any damage to your newly-renovated house?

LAURIE: We were without power for nine days and our street alone lost fifteen trees – we had winds of 100 mph – but fortunately, we had no damage. My publisher called after the storm to see if we were going to have to do “Discovering Home II” [because of damage to the house] but I told them, “No, because God knows how much we can handle and I could not have handled that.”

WoF: You said, “One must truly study the details of a home to understand its bones.” Could you elaborate on that? How can we tell what is “bones” and what is better deleted?

LAURIE: The steps we took were trying to find the original year the house was built in order to find its genre. A big clue is the windows and ceiling heights, things like that. An older home might have sealed up windows, mantels that have been replaced, and things that don’t feel like they fit. With a new home you can still look at things like arches, French doors, big windows, Palladian-style windows (the ones that are arched on top), and whether there’s a lot of symmetry or not. If you pay attention to those things you can take inspiration from a genre with the same features. Of course with a new home you have something of a blank slate. The problem I’ve seen all over the country is people trying to make their home into something it’s not – like trying to do a country French interior in their ranch style home. It just doesn’t work.

WoF: What if my home has bad bones? Is there hope?

LAURIE: You can always do things…for example, if the house is dark and oppressive you might tray the ceilings and extend or add windows. If things feel off balance you could move doorways. There are fairly simple cosmetic changes that can be utterly transforming to a room. We had a room that didn’t have any windows and we added a big window on one wall. It totally changed the room. It’s almost disorienting; you come in and you can hardly tell where you are. If a house is structurally sound and doesn’t have things like a bad foundation, then there’s not necessarily such a thing as bad bones.

WoF: When decorating our homes, when should we call in an interior designer? What should we do to make that a successful collaboration?

LAURIE: That’s really a personal choice. When you draw line in the sand might be when you’re not finding furniture and accessories on your own and need a designer who has access to trade resources. So if you’ve pounded the pavement and can’t find the particular piece you want it might be time to approach someone who has access to these things. You know, there’s a debate in the trade about which came first, like the chicken and the egg. Retail says that they created the decorating craze, but of course we say that we created the demand with the shows. I do think that retail resources more accessible to consumers now than even six years ago.
One thing you really need is something that inspires you. When working with a decorator they can sometimes say, “You need this…” and you can lose yourself. Your room becomes the decorator’s artistic statement more than your own. If you have that object or photo to start with, you determine what it is that moves you about it: the mood, simplicity, texture, whatever. Then you can always point back to that inspiration to stay on track. I think the chapter on “Finding Your Inspiration” is really the pivotal one in the book. If people can really believe in their inspiration, it takes 99.9% of the fear out the decorating formula.

WoF: The title of your book is “Discovering Home” – what does that mean to you?

LAURIE: I think really it’s rooted in the mission statement, “Home is the reflection of the soul.” What inspires me is how that is a discovery process. Finding an object and evaluating how and why something inspires me is a constant discovery process. I think home is something we never cease to discover – my home is always in the process of discovery and I think we always will be discovering new things about it. I think the title helps the reader understand that it’s a process – sometimes a never-ending process. But that’s the beauty of it - I know I would never want to get to the point where my home was “finished”.