One of those builders budgeted $27,000 for the cabinetry. Another budgeted $115,000. Neither of them knows what cabinetry this client is going to pick.

If you have ever been handed a stack of bids like that, you already know the feeling. Something must be wrong here. Someone is padding this. Someone is trying to take advantage of me.

I understand that instinct completely. When you cannot read a document, suspicion is a reasonable default. Most homeowners have never seen a construction bid before the week they have to choose one, and there is a lot of money attached to a decision you feel unqualified to make.

But in my experience, a $200,000 spread almost never means someone is lying to you. It usually means the three bids are not measuring the same thing, and nothing in the documents tells you that.

Here is how to find out what you are actually looking at.

Quick disclosure, because it matters: we also build. Kaage Homes is a design-build firm, so sometimes we are one of the bids. Sometimes a project is not a fit for our schedule or our scope and we design it and then help our client choose the right builder. I am going to tell you how to take apart a bid like mine.

Why the bids do not match

There is no standard format for a construction bid. Every GC has built their own over years of running their own jobs. The line items are roughly the same work, but they get different names, they show up in a different order, and they are grouped differently.

So when you lay three bids side by side, you are not comparing three prices for one project. You are comparing three different documents that each describe the project the way that builder thinks about it.

And the single biggest reason the numbers diverge is buried inside them, usually unlabeled.

Allowances

An allowance is just a budget for materials.

Your bid will carry allowances for cabinetry, tile, plumbing fixtures, lighting, hardware, countertops, appliances, and a long list of other things. It is the builder’s placeholder for a decision you have not made yet.

Nothing in a bid highlights these in yellow. Sometimes allowances are broken out on their own line. Sometimes they are baked into a labor number and you would never know. Sometimes they are labeled clearly and sometimes they are labeled something else entirely.

This is where the money hides.

On this project, one builder allowed $27,000 for cabinetry for the entire house. Another allowed $115,000. Same house, same drawings.

That is not a pricing difference. Neither builder knows what cabinetry you are going to choose. In most cases you are free to order cabinetry from anywhere you like. They may have millworkers they use and recommend, and that recommendation is worth something. But nine times out of ten an allowance is a builder saying this is what people spend, this is what seems reasonable to me.

It is a guess about a decision that is yours to make.

Why this can cost you

Here is the trap.

You compare three bottom-line numbers and pick the lowest one. What you may have actually picked is the builder with the lowest guesses about your material budgets, whose labor is the most expensive of the three.

You will not find that out at signing. You will find it out six months later when your cabinetry comes in over allowance and the number you agreed to stops meaning anything.

Step one: strip the allowances out

To compare bids honestly, you have to even them out.

Go through each bid and identify every allowance. Ask the builder directly if you cannot tell, and be specific: which of these line items are material budgets, and which are labor? Any good builder will answer this without hesitation. Hesitation is itself information.

Then zero them all out.

What remains is the actual thing you are comparing: labor, supervision, and the builder’s fee. That is the real bid. That is the part that reflects who is going to be in your house every day for the next year.

While you are asking, ask this too: am I allowed to buy materials from anywhere, or do I have to buy through you? That single answer determines whether the allowances in front of you mean anything at all.

Now: labor costs different amounts for a reason

I cannot stress this enough.

All carpenters are not the same. All painters are not the same. All tile installers are not the same.

If you strip the allowances out of three bids and find three different paint numbers, do not simply take the cheapest one. I have seen a three times spread on paint for the same house. One painter at fifty thousand dollars, another at a hundred and fifty.

Both of those numbers can be correct. They are pricing different standards of work.

I know this because I once tried to save five thousand dollars on a lacquer room and it became the most expensive mistake I have made as a design-builder. The short version: I got a quote for $17,000, my stomach dropped, I bid it out, found $12,000, and felt like a genius. The finish came back with orange peel everywhere. We ripped all of it out, sanded and re-primed the entire room, and hired the painter who quoted $17,000 in the first place.

I paid for that lesson twice. So when I tell you the cheapest number is not the cheapest number, it is not because it is not my money.

What you owe your GC

This is the part almost nobody does, and it is the part that changes the outcome.

Tell your builder what you actually care about.

If budget is the thing that matters most, say that out loud. If you have found a house you love and you want to make it work and you know it is not going to be perfect, and you can live with a caulk line that is not flawless, your builder needs to hear it. That is a completely legitimate way to run a project and a good builder can hit that target.

If you are someone who will notice every imperfection, your builder needs to hear that even more. If you are going to see the one place where the blue tape came up wrong, or where the cabinetry does not meet the stone perfectly, then you need the best craftsmen your GC knows.

And I am going to be honest with you: those people are expensive.

The mistake is not choosing a price point. The mistake is not telling anyone which price point you chose, and then being disappointed by a result that matched a standard you never named.

How your builder makes money

There is more than one legitimate way, and none of them are wrong. They are just different, and you should know which one you are signing.

Open book, cost plus. This is what my team does. Every receipt from every subcontractor and every material is available to our clients when they ask. We lead with our fee because we know exactly how intense our project management is and what our service is worth. We are not the cheapest, and we are not close. We would rather stand on the fee than bury it.

Marked up. Some builders quietly add margin on top of the work. This is normal and it is how a lot of the industry runs.

Supplier relationships. Some builders have arrangements with suppliers and receive something back for directing work there.

All of this should be disclosed in your contract. If you cannot tell which model you are looking at, ask before you sign, not after.

What to actually do this week

1. Lay the bids side by side and find every allowance in each one.

2. Ask each builder directly which line items are material budgets and which are labor.

3. Zero the allowances out and compare what is left.

4. Ask whether you can source materials anywhere.

5. Tell each builder, in plain language, what standard you are trying to hit.

6. Ask how each one gets paid.

You will still have three different numbers when you are done. But you will finally know what they are numbers for. And you will feel fabulous about it.

If you remember nothing else, remember this - the lowest bid is not always the one with the smallest total. It is the one with the fewest assumptions, and you cannot see the assumptions until you take the allowances out.

This is one of the things we are building The Design Office around. When it opens, I am handing over the actual GC bid comparison matrix my team uses on real projects, so you can do this yourself line by line.

Join the waitlist here.

Which was expected. The listing agent had told us to let ourselves in, and she said it in a completely normal, professional tone, the way a person says a thing that is not going to matter later.

It mattered later.

The year was 2020. A strange year, by any measure.

And during that strange year, KC and I let ourselves into a very large, very empty, very old house in Logan Square on a Tuesday afternoon.

I should establish that I do not get frightened inside houses. Houses are where I am calmest. I have walked through houses with no floor. I have been in places that clearly hosted animals in a management capacity. I have stood in a stranger’s crawlspace by myself, on purpose, for eleven minutes.

The house had been vacant a while. Ornate entry hall. Dark heavy original millwork. Ten-foot ceilings. Pocket doors that still worked, which always feels like being handed a compliment.

We walked the first floor. Living room, dining room, a parlor somebody ruined in 1987 and that could be unruined for a reasonable number.

We walked the second. Four bedrooms and a bathroom that had been tiled by someone in an emotional state. Then up to the attic, because in an old house the top floor is where you learn what you are actually dealing with.

A vacant hundred-year-old house on a weekday afternoon is not quiet. Quiet is a house with a refrigerator in it.

That house was silent.

The plaster takes every sound in the room and hands you back nothing, and you become aware of the noise your own jeans make.

KC was across the room with a flashlight, doing the thing where he presses on something, looks concerned, and does not tell me why.

And then, from somewhere below us, at a volume I would describe as a low growl:

“Helloooooooo.”

Friends.

I have never left my body so fast.

Every hair on both arms went up. I looked at KC. KC looked at me. Two adults who make a living inside other people’s houses, standing in one we had every legal right to be in, silently agreeing that this was where it ended for us.

Then the footsteps started.

Coming up. Not fast. That was the worst part. A fast footstep is a person in a hurry. A slow footstep is a person who knows the house better than you do.

Or, and this is precisely where my mind went, not a someone at all.

A something.

I would like to tell you that I did something useful.

What I did, all I could think to do, was shush KC. He had not made a sound. The thing downstairs had already announced itself, out loud, in English. But I shushed him.

It was the listing agent.

Her schedule had opened up, so she drove over, and she let herself in through the unlocked front door she had told us to let ourselves in through, and then she called up the stairs like a normal woman in a house she had a key to.

She was lovely.

She had a folder.

Would have loved a text.

I keep coming back to that afternoon, and not only because I still occasionally hear “helloooooooo” while trying to fall asleep.

I come back to it because that house, the one that nearly ended me on a Tuesday, was one of the better houses I saw all year.

That is the pattern.

The houses I love most are almost always the ones everyone else wants to get out of quickly.

Dark. Dated. Vacant. Gutted. There is a smell you decide not to identify. There are tarps. There is a room that used to be a different room, and a staircase in a spot that can only be described as a decision.

Buyers walk in, feel the temperature of the place, and start narrating their exit.

I walk in and start doing math.

Now. I refuse to be the woman who romanticizes a disaster, so.

Not every wreck is a hidden gem.

Some houses are just bad ideas with original millwork.

And they are dangerous precisely because they are charming. A beautiful newel post will carry a house a remarkable distance in a person’s imagination. It will not carry a bad lot, a mangled floor plan, or a foundation with a… story.

After more than a decade of taking these apart, my useful skill is not loving old houses. Anyone can love an old house. That takes four seconds and a bay window.

The skill is knowing the difference.

People assume I walk into a listing and start assessing the kitchen. I could not tell you what most of those kitchens looked like.

An ugly kitchen. Don’t care.

Paint. Don’t care.

Bad tile, strange light fixtures, wallpaper that has clearly been through something. Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care.

The furniture, which is not staying and is not yours, although I will admit a truly upsetting sectional can hold my attention. But still, don’t care.

Cosmetic chaos is loud and cheap, and it is the entire reason a house like that sits on the market while I stand in the front hall doing arithmetic.

What I am looking at, while most people are looking at the kitchen:

• The lot. Its size, its shape, which way it faces, what is beside it and behind it.

• The location, which I cannot renovate.

• Scale and proportion, which is the thing you feel in a room before you can name it.

• Ceiling heights, floor by floor.

• The windows. How many, facing where, how much light gets in and at what hour.

• And the math.

Always the math.

Almost everything inside a house can change.

With enough budget and enough engineering the interior is essentially a suggestion. What I cannot change is where it sits, which way it faces, and where the light comes from.

Which brings me to the most useful questions I know how to ask:

The first is:

Could we make this beautiful?

Almost always, yes. With the right budget I can make an aggressively unpromising house sing. This is not bragging. It is also the least interesting fact about my job.

The second is:

Should we make this beautiful?

Should is where real estate, design, and construction have to be honest with each other. Should accounts for what the house is worth finished, what you have to spend to get there, and whether the problem you are about to solve for four hundred thousand dollars is a problem a different house simply does not have.

Plenty of houses can be transformed.

Not every transformation should happen.

Helping people tell those apart before the money moves is one of the most valuable things I do, and also the least glamorous.

Nobody puts talked a lovely family out of a bad house on a project page.

Which brings me to an off-market house I saw last week in Kenilworth.

One of the agents on our real estate team brought me one of her pocket listings.

It is not listed anywhere and you will not find it, so please do not go looking. You will just drive around Kenilworth being sad about how nice everything is.

It is an old house, and a beautiful one, on a great lot. Nearly half an acre.

A genuinely great lot, which as we have established is the part I cannot manufacture later.

It is already gutted. There is mold. The curb appeal leaves something to be desired… for now.

This is not a refresh. Not a weekend.

It’s order-a-dumpster-and-then-order-another-dumpster work.

But when our team brought it to me, I fell so in love with it that I did not evaluate it as an agent.

I evaluated it because I wanted to buy it.

KC and I looked at it as a development.

Our own project. Our own financing. Something we would restore and sell ourselves. That’s how much I love this house.

I know where the kitchen wants to be, and what the stair situation demands, and how you get from a car to that kitchen carrying groceries without completing a small pilgrimage.

I know how to fence the yard so it feels as big as it actually is.

I know how to fix that horrible stucco and give it the curb appeal it so desperately needs.

I know how to add square footage and where the addition would frame out.

I have known for weeks.

It is very annoying.

Because we cannot take it on.

Our own house is in progress. We have several major client builds underway. We are selling out 60-single family home lots. Our teams are helping countless families into new homes while also reimagining historic ones.

I have tried approximately 47 ways to convince myself that we can take this one on too.

We cannot.

So I am doing the responsible thing, which is handing it to someone else and then thinking about it forever.

If you have been waiting for a special old Kenilworth house, the one with real bones and a real lot and a real reason to fall in love, this may be the one you were waiting for.

And you would not be buying a scary shell and a question mark.

You would be buying a scary shell with a vision and my thinking attached, worked out by somebody who wanted it badly enough to do the whole evaluation on her own dime.

I can show you what I see.

Reply KENILWORTH and I will send photos, details, and the honest version of the numbers.

Or we can just talk about it, which is my preferred activity regardless.

I can show you what I see.

I have been turning that sentence over all summer, because it is what I actually do for a living, and because so many of you ask me about your own projects. Which I love. Never stop doing that.

You send me the Zillow listing.

You send me the floor plan.

You send me the photo of the bizarre addition and ask:

“Can this be fixed?”

Some of you will hire us to design the house.

I hope you do.

Some of you already have architects and designers and builders you love. That’s great, too.

But most of you are still standing in the house you might buy, trying to decide whether any of this makes sense in the first place.

And what I have realized is that not everyone who needs our way of thinking truly needs a full-service Kaage Homes engagement.

Sometimes what you need is to understand how we would look at the problem. And what we would do in your shoes.

I can’t personally design every one of those houses.

But I can show you what I see.

So I spent the summer building a way to do exactly that.

It is called The Design Office.

Seven weeks, live, one major decision at a time, in the order the decisions actually arrive, which is the part everybody gets wrong.

Not a curriculum I invented for a course, and not seven hours of recorded video you will never finish.

It is the process we use professionally, on real houses, with real money on the line. A playbook that was handed down to me over three generations.

I am teaching it live, with office hours, so you can learn how to do what we do on your own house. Virtually, so it does not matter where you live.

A beautiful house is the entire point. It is also the last thing that happens.

Before you get there, somebody has to decide whether the project makes sense at all, what the floor plan needs to do, what deserves to be preserved and what should change, and where the money belongs.

Somebody has to settle which architectural decisions have to happen before anyone is allowed to discuss finishes, who belongs on the team, how to read three bids that do not match, and what has to be selected this month versus what can safely wait until February.

And somebody has to catch the seemingly innocent decision that costs you nothing today and forty thousand dollars in March.

That is the part nobody teaches.

There is an enormous amount of advice in the world about choosing the paint, and almost none about how to decide.

So that is what the seven weeks are for. I want you evaluating a project before you commit to it, making the expensive decisions in the right order, and sitting at a table with your architect and your builder knowing enough about plans and proportion and materials and budgets to hold a real conversation about any of it.

And more than anything, I want you to become very hard to surprise.

I want to teach you to see what I see. I want you running your renovation instead of surviving it.

I want you to be the CEO of the whole thing.

Enrollment opens September 28.

I’m not opening it today, because today was mostly a ghost story.

I’ll tell you exactly what we’re doing, who it’s for, who it absolutely isn’t for, and more very soon.

If you want it first, get on the list here: JOIN THE WAITLIST.

Anyway.

If you want to learn to evaluate houses like this one, get on The Design Office list and I will walk you through all of it this fall.

And if you would rather skip the lesson entirely and just buy the terrifying gutted house and get started in Kenilworth today, we have the perfect project for you.

Save me from myself.

Until next Sunday,

Grace

P.S. I did apologize to the listing agent for the look on my face. She was gracious about it. She also described the house as “quiet,” a word I now hear differently.

P.P.S. Separately, and less dramatically: our team is growing and taking on new projects. If you have a house you want us to sell, design or build, call us. I want to hear about it.

Forty-four. Million.

To put that into perspective, it remains the most viewed incident of my life. It beat the lemonade video by a humiliatingly narrow margin of approximately 4 million views.

And for the past two years, I have lived with the knowledge that millions of strangers have watched my two-year-old methodically destroy a room while presumably wondering:

Where was his mother?

Friends.

I was 14 feet away.

So today, for once and for all, I would like to tell you what actually happened.

It was a Sunday afternoon.

I was in the kitchen cooking dinner, my daughter was with me, and my husband was in the living room watching the Bears.

I had just returned from Whole Foods with a completely unreasonable assortment of ingredients and the confidence of a woman who had decided she was going to make handmade pasta with a cream sauce from scratch.

My Italian friends may stop reading here.

I was also searing chicken. And onions. And peppers.

The cream sauce required attention. So did the chicken. So did the pasta, and so did my daughter, and my phone was naturally somewhere nearby receiving contracts and emails, because apparently I have never once in my life considered simply being unavailable.

But I had this handled.

Importantly, the kitchen in that house was laid out so that I could cook dinner while maintaining a perfect line of sight into the family room, where my two-year-old son Christian was playing.

(I now know he was not playing.)

But at the time, everything seemed fine.

Nobody was screaming.

Nobody was crying.

There was no breaking glass, and there was no crash followed by that terrifying silence that causes every mother in America to drop what she is holding and sprint toward the sound.

There was just the sizzling of chicken, and peace. A tremendous amount of peace.

Suspicious, in hindsight.

Approximately 45 minutes into my culinary extravaganza, I finally glanced over my shoulder.

And there was Christian, finishing his magnum opus in red Sharpie.

On my couch.

On both swivel chairs.

On my coffee table.

And, in what I can only assume was a final burst of artistic confidence, on my daughter’s favorite stuffed puppy.

My mother has a saying: no good deed goes unpunished.

And so there I stood, a woman who had simply tried to provide her family with a beautiful home-cooked Sunday dinner, staring at a sofa that had been unmistakably improved by a two-year-old.

The internet loved it.

I did not.

But I understand, now, why that video traveled as far as it did.

Because I think nearly every woman I know has had her own version of the Red Sharpie Incident.

Maybe nobody actually drew on your sofa.

Maybe you were answering an email while making lunches while signing a permission slip while remembering that someone needs a birthday present by tomorrow.

Maybe you were on a conference call trying to quietly unload the dishwasher, and then realized the dishwasher was making so much noise that the entire conference call could hear you unloading the dishwasher.

Maybe you walked upstairs for one thing, came back down carrying six unrelated objects, started a load of laundry, answered a text, ordered toothpaste, and never actually did the thing you went upstairs to do.

We multitask like mothers.

There are so many tabs open at any given moment that we have stopped recognizing them as tabs.

It is simply Tuesday.

Like this one last week on my walk home from work…

And you need to know, I love my life.

My family is the absolute center of my universe.

But I also think I’m entitled to be my own little planet sometimes.

With my own atmosphere.

And my own habits and gravity, and with interests that have nothing whatsoever to do with whether anyone has clean socks tomorrow.

For me, unsurprisingly, those interests lead directly into very old houses with extraordinary finishes.

And there is probably no material on earth I love more than natural stone.

I love marble, quartzite, dolomite.

I love dramatic slabs with veining so ridiculous that they become the entire point of a room.

If you have ever wondered what I do in my free time, first of all, strange question.

But the answer is that I am very likely on Pinterest looking at rare stone and trying to figure out where I can use it next.

There is an entire universe in here. There is the Mohs scale of hardness. There are quartzites, and then there are thirsty quartzites. There are marbles, and then there are MARBLES. There are approximately 200 opinions on how marble should be sealed, treated, protected and maintained.

And then there is my increasingly preferred option, which is to do almost nothing at all and let the thing age the way Europeans have been letting it age for several hundred years.

Once, a designer told me she always begins a project by selecting the cabinet color and then designs everything else around it.

I smiled politely.

I have never done this a day in my life. I find the stone, and then I build the room around the stone.

Which brings me to you.

Specifically, to those of you reading this while managing complex schedules, supervising children, ordering groceries, responding to someone from work, and wondering why nobody else in your household appears capable of noticing when the paper towel roll is empty.

I have planned something for us.

This Saturday, I am taking over the entire Workshoppe for one hour and we are calling it:

Marble & Mimosas.

Come drink a mimosa. Eat a macaron. Look at beautiful stone, have extremely strong opinions about veining, and ask me every natural-stone question you have ever wanted to ask.

Or ask absolutely nothing at all and simply enjoy being in a room where nobody needs you to locate their shoes.

In other words, I’m giving you permission to treat yourself. You deserve that.

I am also bringing in a very special guest from one of our stone suppliers, who is going to give us a proper presentation on natural stone: how the materials differ, what to look for, and why some slabs behave very differently from others.

And here is where this gets particularly fun.

If you have ever walked into a stone supplier and fallen in love with a slab, you may have discovered something mildly infuriating.

They will not tell you what it costs.

Pricing goes through the fabricator, which is all well and good, except that sometimes a woman would simply like to know what the beautiful rock costs before she reorganizes her entire kitchen around it.

Well, friends. We are stone dealers now.

Which means that when you order through us, you can actually get pricing.

Out loud. In advance.

A revolutionary concept.

And if you fall in love with something on Saturday, we will set up your appointment to see the full slabs in person, and then we handle the rest of it: stone, fabrication coordination, measurements, delivery, installation. All of it.

If you’re into that sort of thing.

But none of that is really why I am inviting you.

I am inviting you because you have been running nine programs at once since roughly six o’clock this morning.

And because I think you are allowed to have one interest that belongs entirely to you.

For one hour, there is no agenda other than indulging something because you happen to enjoy it, and I think we could all use a little more of that.

See you this Saturday.

I’ll bring the marble, you just get yourself there.

And maybe hide the Sharpies before you leave.

Until then,
Grace

P.S. I would prefer not to dramatically underestimate the champagne requirements, so please email Christopher Grooms and let him know you’re coming. Husbands are also welcome.

And if you know another woman who loves houses, stone and design, or who simply needs to escape a toddler who is almost certainly coloring on something priceless right now, forward this to her.

She should come too.

The Workshoppe by Kaage Homes address is 562 Lincoln Avenue in Winnetka, IL.

Rooms. Doorways. A kitchen island.

The entire new floor plan marked out in blue painter’s tape and labeled in careful handwriting, the way a person labels things they have been thinking about for a very long time.

In two places, the tape reached the back wall, passed directly through it, and continued onto the deck.

I decided not to mention that yet. Partly because Bobby was already giving us the tour, and partly because you do not lead with the worst thing you know.

But I should back up, because this starts a few hours earlier.

We met Bobby in March, seven months into his renovation, which is roughly the point when a person stops being a homeowner and becomes a hostage.

The house was a 1926 four-square.

At that particular moment it was studs, dust and one working outlet that everyone on site treated like a shared resource in a survival film.

Bobby looked like the person everyone hopes will drive the speedboat when it’s time for tubing at the lake house. A trustworthy old vest. Lived-in jeans. Sneakers that had actually been worn. Reading glasses pushed into hair going gray at the temples and clearly cut by the same person for twenty years. He had the kind of face that apologized for taking up your time, even when he had called the meeting, and he shook our hands with both of his.

He was probably the most prepared person in every room he entered, and he had no need for you to know it.

We sat down at his dining room table, which was a sheet of plywood balanced on two sawhorses.

Bobby offered us coffee.

There was no kitchen.

He had only a Yeti.

I liked Bobby immediately, because Bobby cared. He had a folder containing four hundred saved images, organized by room and then, within each room, by element. He knew the tile. He knew the windows. He knew the exact brass he wanted, and he knew it would patina, and he actually had feelings about how quickly.

Most people come to us with a Pinterest board and a vibe.

Bobby came to us with a thesis.

He also had a phrase, which he used roughly two hundred times over the following six weeks.

“I’m not trying to be difficult.”

And he wasn’t. Bobby was not trying to be difficult.

He was managing it accidentally, which is significantly harder.

After coffee, he offered to give us the tour. Of what, I could not tell you. You could stand in the front hall and see through to the backyard, the neighbors and, in one memorable spot, the sky.

But Bobby could see all of it. Not what was there. What would be there. The primary suite. The new staircase. The kitchen at the back. The wall of glass. Every room existed fully formed in his mind, and the blue tape beneath our feet was his attempt to make the rest of us see it too.

Honestly, it was kind of beautiful.

It also did not fit.

He stopped in the front room. Fireplace, bay window, maybe four hundred square feet.

“This is where the primary will be.”

“The whole living room?”

“Yes. And the dining room too.”

“But where will everybody eat?”

Bobby gestured absently toward the kitchen, which was currently at the front of the house and which, according to the tape, would soon become the back of the house. And I want to be fair to him here, because it would have been a spectacular primary suite. I could see it exactly as he saw it, which is what made the rest of the afternoon so uncomfortable.

Then he put his hand flat against the wall between the living room and the dining room.

“This has to go.”

He said it the way you would mention the weather.

We told him we could remove it, and it would require a beam, and the beam would have a point load, and the point load would have to land somewhere, and where it wanted to land was not especially convenient to Bobby’s floor plan.

Bobby considered this.

“Ok. I’m sure we’ll find a workaround.”

I want to be respectful here, so I will simply say that gravity was not available for negotiation that afternoon. It is also, I suspect, right about where his last design-builder quietly relocated to another state.

Upstairs, Bobby climbed a stepladder, raised his hand and held it flat above his head.

“I want it to feel like this.”

His hand was about ten feet up. It was also, at that moment, inside the roof.

The existing ceilings were eight feet, and the roof above them was not a suggestion. Going to ten meant rebuilding the roof structure, which meant rebuilding most of the second floor, which meant we were no longer renovating a house. We were building a new one on top of a foundation somebody poured in 1926.

But the moment I remember most came downstairs:

Bobby walked to the back of the house and stood exactly where he wanted the kitchen sink to be. He looked through a window that did not exist yet, and his whole face changed.

“Right here,” he said. “Seven in the morning. Coffee. Sun coming across the yard.”

He could see it. He had saved images of it.

The back of the house faced west.

I explained that the room could have beautiful afternoon and evening light, but that it would never have the morning light he was describing. Bobby was quiet for a moment. Long enough that I started counting studs.

“So there’s really no way to get it back here?”

There wasn’t. Not that light. Not at seven in the morning. Not without putting the kitchen somewhere else.

And that was the moment I finally understood the problem.

Bobby was spending an enormous amount of money. He was taking a building down to its studs. From where he stood, this was major construction, and major construction should mean you get exactly what you want.

That is not entitlement. That is arithmetic. If the investment is that big, the picture in your head should show up in real life.

The problem was never Bobby’s standards.

The problem was that Bobby had bought the wrong kind of project.

And I understand exactly how he got there, because this happens.

Renovation is where the mind goes first. It feels like the sensible option, the one you do not have to justify at dinner. And there is something genuinely romantic about it. Plaster. Wavy glass. A staircase somebody’s grandmother climbed. A history you get to join instead of start. That is a real reason to renovate, and a large part of why we love what we do.

But somewhere along the way, renovation picked up a reputation it did not earn.

More romantic? Yes.

More creatively challenging? Often.

Easier?

Not. At. All.

New construction is a blank page, and blank pages are intimidating. But they are honest. Renovation is a puzzle somebody else designed, where half the pieces are hidden inside the walls and you commit to a budget before anyone is allowed to open them.

In new construction, your surprises are usually in the schedule.

In renovation, your surprises are in the framing.

They are difficult in different ways, and they suit different people.

I have started naming those people, mostly for my own sanity:

The Rescuer is in love with the house itself. The Rescuer will save the original newel post at a cost that makes no financial sense whatsoever and will be right to do it. Tell a Rescuer that a wall needs to stay and they ask whether the plaster can be saved too. For the Rescuer, the house is the client.

The Editor likes the bones and wants to change about half of them. Tell an Editor a wall needs to stay and they get curious. “Okay, what if the opening goes here instead?” Forty minutes later they have designed something better than the original idea. The limitations give the Editor somewhere to begin.

The Author already has the whole house written. Every room. Every sightline. The light at seven in the morning. Tell an Author a wall needs to stay and they feel robbed. Not because they are spoiled, but because they can see the finished house so clearly that anything less feels like a downgrade from something that already exists.

Authors are the reason genuinely beautiful houses get built. They are also, inside a renovation, the most miserable people alive.

Rescuers and Editors can thrive in renovations. The Author belongs in new construction.

And there is a fairly fast way to figure out which one you are. Think about how you feel when someone tells you that the thing you want is not possible.

Protective of the house? You are a Rescuer.

Challenged? You are an Editor.

Cheated? You are an Author, and you should probably be building new.

None of these is better than the others. There is only a very expensive version of being in the wrong one.

Bobby was an Author who had bought a house to edit.

He came to us with a thesis, remember. Authors always do. And the moment I understood that, his requests stopped sounding unreasonable. They just sounded misplaced. Everything on Bobby’s list was buildable. The primary suite. The ceilings. The glass. The kitchen filled with morning light. All of it.

Just somewhere else.

Which brings me to the part that actually matters.

We have renovated enough houses to know that almost anything inside a home can be changed. We can move the kitchen. We can add bathrooms. We can rebuild an addition that was apparently constructed using optimism and two concrete blocks. Given enough budget and enough engineering, the inside of a house is essentially a suggestion.

But there are a few decisions we inherit every single time.

Where the house sits.

Which direction it faces.

Where the sunlight comes from.

What it looks out at.

In other words, the decisions somebody made about the lot before they ever designed the house. Those are the ones we cannot renovate our way out of.

Those are the decisions that sent Bobby’s blue painter’s tape through an exterior wall and onto the deck.

And that is why, when you are building a custom home, the first design decision is not the kitchen. It is not the exterior. It is not even the floor plan.

It is choosing the right piece of land.

Which is, honestly, why our real estate team was excited to take on The Foresman.

For those of you who are new here, The Foresman is a 60-lot custom-home community listed by our real estate team and one of the largest new residential neighborhoods in Glenview. We are approached about a fair amount of development work these days, so we are thoughtful about the listings we take on.

And this project, this all-new inventory, was sorely needed.

We knew that because we kept meeting Authors. People with four hundred saved images, excellent taste and a real budget, who had already purchased a house that was never going to become the house in their head. Before The Foresman, there was almost nowhere good to send them.

When we evaluate a custom-home development, we are not only evaluating the property. We are evaluating the developers and the way they believe a neighborhood should be built. The Foresman was developed by builders, but what we loved was that they were genuinely willing to collaborate with other builders. Buyers can bring their own builder, their own architect and their own designer, and those professionals are welcomed into the plan instead of treated as a complication.

That is rarer than it sounds. And we are very much rising-tide-lifts-all-boats people, so that openness felt completely aligned with the way we already work.

Once you have the freedom to assemble the right team, the next question is the important one: How do you choose the right lot for the house you actually want to build?

Here is what I look at before I draw a single room.

1. Where will the light come from, and what will you look at?

This costs nothing to get right and almost everything to get wrong.

East-facing windows wake up with you. West-facing windows tend to be quieter in the morning and glowing at dinner. A backyard shadowed by its own house in the middle of the afternoon is a backyard that may not live the way you imagined. So I am immediately thinking about where the family will drink coffee, where they will spend most of the day, and whether the yard will feel bright at four in the afternoon or like a cave.

Then I look outward. Green space can hand you a view you do not have to maintain. Interior lots may feel quieter and more contained. Corner lots can bring more light and architectural flexibility, but also more exposure, because the side of the house that would normally be private has become a second front.

I am not just choosing where the house goes. I am choosing what the kitchen sink looks at for the next twenty years.

There is no universally best lot. There is a best lot for the house and the life you are trying to create.

None of this is especially expensive to solve at this stage. You simply have to ask the question before you own the answer.

We can change the cabinetry later.

We cannot move east.

2. What kind of house can the lot comfortably hold?

This question is about shape, not just size.

Frontage and depth determine whether you are building a wider house or a deeper one. Setbacks determine how much of the lot you can actually use, which is almost never the number people assume after looking at the property line. And some wishes are quietly land-hungry. A first-floor primary suite is a wonderful thing to want, and it also consumes an enormous amount of ground floor. On a narrow lot, that can mean a very deep house or a very small backyard. On a wider or double lot, it can feel effortless.

Same house. Same budget. Completely different life. Decided by a piece of dirt.

A larger lot is not automatically the right lot.

And before you compare the price of one piece of land with another, you also need to understand whether you are buying a lot or buying a project before the project. When people calculate the cost of building new, they usually think about the cost of the new house.

They forget about the old one.

The old house does not politely thank you for its service and disappear after closing. It needs to be surveyed. Permitted. Disconnected from its utilities. Demolished. Sorted. Hauled away. It is a remarkable financial experience in which you spend an enormous amount of money tearing a house down and, at the end, own less house than you did before.

Congratulations.

You have achieved dirt.

That is another reason we loved The Foresman. These lots are delivered build-ready, which means the expensive and time-consuming process of creating buildable land has already been handled.

You are not buying a house you must erase before you can begin your project. You are buying the starting line.

3. How will your family actually arrive and live there?

This is the least romantic question, and it may determine your daily happiness more than any other.

Where does the driveway enter? Which way does the garage face, and does that put the mudroom beside the kitchen or three rooms away? Can the children come in from the backyard without tracking through the living room? Where do eleven people park when you host Thanksgiving?

The prettiest front elevation in the world will not make you happy if the groceries have to complete a small pilgrimage before reaching the kitchen.

This is the advantage of starting with the right land and the right team. You are not inheriting someone else’s floor plan or forcing your life into a house designed for another family.

You get to solve for your actual mornings.

And clearly, buyers understood how unusual that combination was. Of the 60 lots at The Foresman, 44 have already sold, and a handful of those remaining are reserved for builders. What began as an opportunity to choose from an entirely new neighborhood is now down to a very limited number of chances to build there.

I do not use the phrase “opportunity of a generation” casually. But a substantial new neighborhood of build-ready custom-home lots, in a community where land like this rarely becomes available, with the freedom to bring your own builder, architect and designer?

I am comfortable using it here.

And it really is almost gone.

So if you know someone who’s considering building at The Foresman, do not begin by asking which remaining lot is the biggest. Tell us about the house you want and the way your family actually lives. Do you want a first-floor primary suite? Morning light in the kitchen? A wider house? A deeper backyard?

Tell us what you are trying to write. We will help you understand which of the remaining lots is capable of holding it.

And now is exactly the right time, because the village of Glenview will begin reviewing plans for permit approval as early as August 31.

Bobby finished his house, by the way. It is beautiful, and I mean that. He was right about the brass. He was right about the tile. And he was right that the staircase was in a very inconvenient place.

He compromised on the ceilings. And the kitchen stayed at the front of the house, which, as I am sure you have guessed, is where the morning light had been the entire time.

He is happy. But it is the kind of happy that comes with an asterisk, and I think about that asterisk constantly. Because everything on Bobby’s list was possible. All of it.

Just not in that location.

He tells me he’ll be back in a couple years to build new. And I won’t be surprised when that day comes.

So if you read this and quietly recognized yourself as an Author, take that seriously. It is not a character flaw. It is a spec.

Authors build the best houses. They simply have to start in the right place.

The house can be designed around you. The land is the part we have to get right first.

Until next Sunday,

Grace

P.S. - A few things happening around here to keep you all updated! The Workshoppe by Kaage Homes has been busy in a way I did not entirely prepare for. I keep waiting for it to slow down. It keeps not slowing down. The support from our community has been genuinely unreal, and as you now know, I do not use that word casually either. I cannot thank you all enough.

P.P.S. - We are circling two historic homes on the North Shore. If they come together, we will take them down to the studs, put them back the right way, and list them. So if you are hoping to land in a finished fixer-upper sometime in 2027, and you would like a Kaage Homes project, reply to this email and will add you to the list.

P.P.P.S - The real estate team is cooking. We recently added a Director of Sales, Dylan Dolphin. You will love her. And we officially have a showroom manager. Christopher Grooms spent decades in fashion retail at Burberry and Christian Dior, which means he has spent his entire career around fabric, finish, proportion, and the specific way a beautiful thing ought to be presented to somebody. Watching him turn all of that toward houses has been one of my favorite parts of this year. Reply to me if you want a private Workshoppe tour and I’ll connect you.

Technically.

There was a moment, somewhere between the third hug and the fortieth surprise appearance, when my eyes did something suspicious.

But per last week’s legal disclaimer, that was construction dust.

The Goro record remains intact.

My father would be proud, if pride were an emotion our family acknowledged.

So the store is open. The shelves survived. The marble didn't break, the flowers didn't wilt, and you came. Three rooms full of the smartest, most design-literate people we know, celebrating a dream. I can admit this now: that whole morning I was quietly convinced not a soul would show up.

I am enormously grateful.

I am also ready to discuss literally anything else.

Not because of you, you’re lovely, keep asking. It’s me: if I hear myself retell the opening story one more time, I am going to walk into the lake after the golf cart.

Because it’s not about the opening.

I know how that sounds.

A year of permits and pegboard, weekly dispatches from inside our own renovation, actual invitations in actual mailboxes, and now I’m telling you the store was the appetizer.

Stay with me, because this is the most honest thing I’ve written in this newsletter, and that includes the confession email I told you to burn.

Because a store, even ours, even with the pink onyx, was never going to be the whole idea.

You build a place like The Workshoppe when everything you’ve done for over a decade, the firm, the licenses, the five houses, has been converging on one idea… and the idea finally needs a front door.

Now it has one.

Which means the opening wasn’t the finale.

It was us setting the table. The meal is what comes next.

At the party, a woman I’d just met stood in the middle of the shop, looked around, and said:

“This is incredible. I could never do what you do.”

Some version of that sentence has followed me around for years, and every time I hear it I want to grab the person gently by the shoulders and explain that this is not alchemy. It is simply a series of decisions made in the right order, with a useful tax rule standing at the end holding a very large door open.

Here’s our pattern, for the newer readers: KC and I have moved five times in twelve years.

Bought, renovated, lived in, sold. Repeated. Our children believe cardboard boxes are seasonal décor, and as I confessed back in May, the neighbors have started to notice.

From the outside it probably looks like we’re restless.

We are not restless.

We are compounding.

And before you close this email because you have zero interest in moving five times in twelve years: correct. Neither do most people with functioning attachment to their belongings.

We are not the prescription.

We are the proof of concept.

If this works so well that our family keeps doing it over and over, on purpose, with children, think about what it could do for you exactly once.

Most people get a handful of home purchases in a lifetime, and usually one that really matters. This is about making that one count fully.

Which is exactly why today’s post exists.

When I began this newsletter in April, I made myself a promise: stop hoarding what I know, share it regularly, share it honestly.

Since then, you’ve grown from about 30,000 of you to 129,000 and counting.

And as much as I’d love to believe you’re all here for the before and afters, I know better. You’re here for the education and the inside scoop, too.

So consider today me making good on that promise: three generations in real estate, more design-builds than I can count, everything I know (and think about more often than I should), shared here one Sunday at a time.

Including…

The rule everyone vaguely knows

Section 121 of the tax code. An unusually helpful bit that has changed my life more than once. Here it is, stripped of the confidence with which it gets explained at cocktail parties:

Own a home and live in it for two of the five years before you sell, and generally a married couple filing jointly can exclude up to $500,000 of the gain from federal tax. Single filers, up to $250,000.

There’s no lifetime limit; you just have to qualify each time, and not more than once every two years.

Your accountant knows it well. I am not an accountant, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. (Kidding. Nothing in this email is tax advice. But it does explain why our moving boxes never make it all the way to the attic.)

But here is the part most people miss. The tax code does not create the gain. It lets you keep more of a gain you successfully created.

Section 121 is not the strategy. It is the tailwind.

The part nobody teaches

The actual strategy fits much less comfortably at a cocktail party.

First, you have to buy a house with fixable problems, at a price that leaves room to fix them.

You have to know which improvements the market will reward, and which ones you simply want because you’ve spent too much time looking at unlacquered brass on the internet.

Then you have to solve the house in the right order. And you have to live there, with the dust and the decisions and at least a two-year clock.

And then the market has to agree that your decisions made the house more valuable.

That is the machine.

The tax rule is just standing nearby, being unusually helpful.

The math on one house

One important distinction first: taxable gain and actual profit are cousins, not twins.

For tax purposes, the simplified math starts with the sale price, subtracts selling expenses, and subtracts the home’s adjusted basis. That basis includes what you paid for the house and qualifying capital improvements. It does not include every dollar you spent maintaining, repairing, or decorating it.

Simplified illustration, using opportunities we often see in my area, as an example:

“Federally taxable gain,” in plain English: the portion of your profit the IRS is allowed to tax. On most money you make, that’s all of it. On this house: none of it.

And so we’re clear about what a ~$0 gain actually means: it means the government is not sending you an enormous tax bill on your profits. To illustrate how huge a benefit that is, imagine the $500k came from three different places.

(Rough ranges for a high-earning Illinois couple. Your bracket and your accountant will refine them. Again, not an accountant. Just your real-estate-and-design-obsessed best friend.)

Same half million. The difference between the last row and the rest is a college education.

And yes, even the lottery gets taxed like a paycheck.

Your house is the only jackpot the government lets you keep.

This is the door the tax rule is holding open.

Now, the skeptical footnote, because this table is not a complete investment analysis. Real life also includes mortgage interest, property taxes, insurance, permits, design fees, moving, overruns, and the cost of your dining room operating as a cabinet warehouse for eight months.

Those dollars are real even though they never appear in the gain calculation. A house that appreciated $500,000 has not automatically made its owners $500,000 wealthier.

The spreadsheet must be more skeptical than the Realtor remarks.

So why doesn’t everyone do this?

Because the rule is easy. The house is hard. Specifically:

Buy ugly, not compromised.

Red oak cabinets and 1987 wallpaper scare buyers, and that fear is useful, because both can be changed. A terrible lot or a location the market consistently rejects is a different animal. Wallpaper is removable. A busy street is committed to the relationship.

The best opportunity is not just the ugliest house; it’s the house where the market has priced the problem more harshly than it will cost you to solve it.

That distinction is where experience earns its keep.

Enter, me.

Respect the value ceiling.

A beautifully renovated house can still be a bad investment.

Every street has a range the market currently understands, and your job is not to spend as much as possible (believe me I’ve seen people with very deep pockets spend their way into very terrible design choices); it’s to know where each dollar works hardest and where spending stops returning the favor.

The market rewards the hierarchy of the house before it rewards the decoration: location, lot, usable square footage, layout, architecture and major systems, and then finishes.

We all enjoy reversing that order, because wallpaper is substantially more fun than drainage.

The house does not care what is fun.

Design for yourself AND the next buyer.

This does not mean beige everything in case someone with no detectable pulse buys it later.

It means making personal decisions inside a house that is fundamentally legible: rooms with clear purposes, circulation that makes sense, storage where humans need storage, major selections that belong to the architecture.

The next buyer should understand why the house works without me standing in the foyer giving a 45-minute presentation.

That’s resale-conscious design. Not generic. Coherent.

And one warning label: the exclusion is not a guarantee. It cannot rescue a bad purchase, force the market to repay an undisciplined renovation, or promise that values rise during your exact two years. It also cannot prevent your child from drawing all over your brand new wallpaper with permanent marker. The tax rule only changes what happens to a gain after you’ve created one.

The skill is creating it.

The honest fine print

Two years owned, two years lived in, within the five years before the sale, no more than once every two years.

Rental use, home offices, depreciation, divorce, health, and job moves all change the math, and people who miss the full requirements may qualify for partial exclusions.

Talk to a qualified tax professional about your situation before you buy, not after you sell.

Building the right team early is half the method anyway.

What I’d do this week

Pick a neighborhood you already understand and pull three recent sales: one house that needed everything, one renovated with restraint and good judgment, and one that spent every available dollar and then located several more. Study the difference.

Then run your own project on paper.

Purchase price, complete renovation scope with a real contingency, selling costs, two years of carrying costs.

Compare against a conservative resale number, not the most exciting comp anyone ever uploaded to the MLS.

Then stress-test it: costs run over, sale comes in light, timeline stretches.

If the project only works when every number behaves perfectly and you set a neighborhood record at the end, it does not succeed. It auditions.

Where this is going

The woman at the opening was right about one thing: the finished result looks impossible when you can’t see the order of operations behind it.

So this is the next chapter, and it’s bigger than a Substack article.

I’m going to show you the whole transformation. How to walk into a dated, unloved house and see the version of it that doesn’t exist yet. Which walls to move and which to forgive. How a kitchen goes from 1987 to the photo people save to their phones.

Where the money hides, how the team gets built, and how a thousand separate decisions become one coherent, beautiful house instead of eating you alive.

The befores and afters you follow us for? We’re opening them up to show you the decisions inside.

It’s what our real estate team does when we walk a property with you. It’s what the design-build firm does every day. It’s why we built the store I am no longer discussing. (At least, not this week.)

And it’s what Sundays here will be, every week, until you stop saying “I could never.”

And for the people who will want the whole method in their hands, I’m building something this fall that can hold it.

That’s all you get for now.

KC says I need to stop announcing things before they’re ready, and as we know he is unfortunately the brakes.

Until next Sunday,

Grace

P.S. The day job continues, gloriously. This week: we’re running out of lots to sell over at The Foresman. Nine (9!) stone slabs are officially on hold across two client projects (the marble equivalent of “going steady”), a contractor coffee at the shop, and a designer consultation booked by a woman named Jill who I already like. If you’re staring at a house and wondering what it could become, a 45-minute designer consultation at The Workshoppe (also available virtually) is the fastest way to borrow our judgment and software. Bring the address and the optimism. We’ll bring the realism.

P.P.S. To the woman from the opening, if you’re reading this: you started something. I hope you’re happy.

We have tear ducts. Presumably. They have simply never been encouraged.

My maiden name is Goro, and the Goros are not what anyone would describe as emotionally demonstrative.

Our family motto growing up was tough as nails, which sounds inspiring until you realize it was primarily deployed the moment a child was visibly injured and hoping an adult might comfort them.

Fall off your bike? Get up, you’re tough as nails. Lose the championship game? Chin up, tough as nails. Sustain an injury that would normally warrant ice, medical attention, or a brief evaluation of whether all limbs remained attached? Walk it off.

The Goros did not coddle.

The Goros barely acknowledged.

We were raised by maniacs, is what I am telling you.

My dad was the leader of these maniacs.

He was born in Chicago, built his fortune in real estate, lost it all during the recession, and then built it all over again. Never cried. Never spiraled. Never gathered the family around to announce that we were entering a difficult season. He just woke up the next morning and went back to work.

Imagine Logan Roy from Succession as a Chicagoan, but with a slightly better relationship with his children and strong opinions about where to get an Italian beef.

That was my dad.

I happened to be the person in the room sitting beside him when his oncologist explained there was nothing more they could do.

As in, this was it.

As in, the kind of conversation the movies usually follow with swelling music, a long embrace, and someone collapsing dramatically against a hospital wall.

My dad walked out of the office, looked at me, and said, “Do you want to stop at Portillo’s on the way home?”

That was the emotional debrief. Terminal diagnosis, chin up, let’s get a chopped salad.

And honestly, it explains nearly everything about me.

Why I can receive genuinely alarming information and immediately begin making a list. Why my natural response to a crisis is not “How does this make everyone feel?” but “Okay, who has a Shop-Vac?” Why, when water started pouring through the ceiling of The Workshoppe three days before our soft opening, I did not interpret it as a sign from God to stop. I interpreted it as a scheduling issue. (More on the ceiling later. It’s a whole thing.)

This is the Goro family gift. We are extremely difficult to kill and somewhat uncomfortable to hug.

Then I married KC.

KC comes from a family that cries. Kind of a lot, if you ask me.

They cry during speeches. They cry at family dinners. They cry while telling stories about other times they cried. Sometimes no one has died or even received moderately disappointing news... they are simply moved.

They hug one another voluntarily. They say loving things out loud without first being diagnosed with something. When I joined the family, every time someone became emotional I assumed there had been an emergency. No. Someone had given a nice toast.

To this day, whenever anyone in KC’s family starts tearing up around a dinner table, my nervous system quietly asks whether we should call someone.

But this is exactly why KC and I work.

I am the gas; KC is the brakes.

I am the Swedish ice queen who regards every obstacle as a mild administrative inconvenience, and KC is the warmth, the patience, the person who would like us to acknowledge that a significant life event is occurring before I open Monday.com and assign everyone a task.

I say, “We should sign the lease.” KC says, “Should we perhaps review the financial implications?”

I say, “I did. They were upsetting.”

And then, usually, we do it anyway.

Which brings me to my confession.

There is a chance I may cry at the Grand Opening of The Workshoppe this Thursday.

I know. Disturbing. Please burn this email immediately after reading.

I have made it through childbirth, business ownership, construction projects, the collapse of the real estate market, the death of my father, and three small children asking me for snacks at the exact same time.

But apparently several hundred people RSVP’ing to see the thing KC and I built might be what finally takes me down.

Because The Workshoppe is not just a store we are opening. It is the physical version of a belief we have been betting our careers, our money, our time, and occasionally our sanity on for years.

And I need you to understand how insane the bet actually was: we signed a lease on a building we do not own, and then we invested nearly $300,000 transforming it.

Again... a building we do not own. Very passive. Very conservative. Extremely normal financial behavior.

The original space was basically a little green box. A very sad, very oddly shaped green box. With strange flooring and, if I may be so bold, completely grotesque soffits.

We reimagined every inch. Cabinetry displays designed by our own team and built to our specifications, plus the stone, lighting, plaster, hardware, wallpaper, paint, and plumbing we actually use in our projects.

All meant to show you what’s possible.

All built while our own house waited... a historic 1898 Benjamin Marshall home that needs approximately everything, and that everyone keeps asking when we’ll finally renovate. Later, apparently.

We spent the renovation money building a place where other people could work on theirs instead.

Deeply generous, or a severe lapse in judgment. Time will tell.

But we built it because we kept watching smart, capable homeowners get sent into an impossible process. One place for cabinetry. Another for stone. Another for plumbing. Five thousand lighting options. Seventeen open browser tabs. A handful of samples that looked beautiful alone and vaguely hostile the moment you set them side by side.

The problem was never that people lacked taste. They lacked a place where all the decisions could be considered together.

So we built one.

A place where you can see the cabinetry, stone, lighting, hardware, wallpaper, and paint together, in context, and in the right order, before you commit to any of it.

Where nobody points you at a wall of 300 cabinet doors and asks whether you’re “more of a Shaker person.” (Um, I don’t know, Bob. I came here hoping you could tell me.)

Our designers draw the millwork themselves, and it’s manufactured to our specifications, with the layout, architecture, appliances, and lighting all worked out before anyone debates hinge finishes.

Because a cabinet is not just a cabinet, and a tiny sample viewed under fluorescent lighting while you’re hungry and quietly questioning your marriage is not an adequate way to make a $100,000 decision.

For years, people have tried to work out exactly what we are.

Are you Realtors? Designers? Builders?

Yes.

That question assumes those things should be separate. We built our entire company on the belief that they should not be.

We are Realtors because a project begins with the property you buy and what the finished house can support.

We are designers because a home’s value lives in its layout, its architecture, its materials, and the thousands of small decisions that make it feel thoughtful instead of like seven different Pinterest boards were involved.

And we are builders because beautiful drawings that cannot be executed on budget are just expensive fan fiction.

But because I write so often about KC and me, it would be easy to assume this is a two-person operation held together by caffeine, marital tension, and an increasingly complicated Monday.com board.

It is not.

Behind us is a frankly unreasonable bench of people building this company with us.

Our designers have worked on places like the Kimpton Hotel in Denver. They have serious credentials with combinations of letters like NCIDQ in their titles, which means they know considerably more than how to choose a beautiful pillow.

Two members of our team came from Kirkland & Ellis, not as attorneys, but from the operational side of an environment where the standards are high, the pace is relentless, and details are not optional. They now bring that same level of rigor to the systems, service, and logistics behind our work.

And our real estate team is made of veteran brokers who could run successful teams entirely on their own but have, through some combination of true belief or temporary poor judgment, chosen to build this one with us.

These are not people KC and I hired to carry out our ideas.

They are people making the ideas better.

They challenge us, catch what we miss, solve the problems we cannot, and bring a level of expertise no two people could possibly contain on their own.

KC and I do not pretend to be the best at everything. What we are good at is seeing what should exist, finding the people capable of building it, and giving them room to be exceptional. And somehow, through some combination of faith and luck, those people keep choosing us back.

That may be the part of this company (companies, really) that I am proudest of.

The Workshoppe is where the whole team finally has a front door.

Which brings us back to the ceiling.

Three days before our soft opening, water began pouring through it. Not dripping... pouring. I’d like the record to reflect that we had not specified an indoor waterfall. The expansion tank upstairs had burst, sending water into the building we’d just spent months and an upsetting amount of money finishing.

Some people might have read that as a sign from the universe, an invitation to pause and reschedule.

Unfortunately, none of those people were Goros.

My brain skipped grief and went straight to logistics:

Where are the towels? Who has a Shop-Vac? Please, someone, move the wallpaper books. We cleaned it up, repaired what needed repairing, and opened three days later, because the defining feature of my personality is looking at an unreasonable situation and saying, “Okay, but what if we did it anyway?”

Now, this Thursday, we officially open the doors. A Grand Opening.

The part that may finally make me cry is not the cabinetry, although the cabinetry is excellent. It’s not the pink onyx, the wallpaper, the lighting, or the hidden Sub-Zero refrigerator that works perfectly despite several moments when it seemed personally committed to ruining KC’s life.

It’s that so many of you are coming.

You watched when it was an empty storefront. You watched us draw it, build it, change it, flood it, dry it out, and keep going. You hired us, referred us, trusted us with your homes, and believed we were building something worth seeing long before there was much to see. And now you’re coming to stand inside it with us.

This is where KC’s family becomes dangerous.

I can survive a construction delay.

I can survive a flooded ceiling.

I can survive spending nearly $300,000 on a building we do not own while our own historic house waits for someone to address its many needs.

That is advanced emotional material.

There is no Goro protocol for it. No equipment rental. No checklist. Just affection, in public.

So yes, I have a confession: there’s a chance I’ll cry at the Grand Opening.

There’s also a chance I’ll feel one emotion, panic, and start giving a stranger an unnecessarily detailed explanation of our inset cabinetry.

Both are equally likely.

Please come anyway. See what we built, open every drawer, touch everything, and tell us what you’re working on. Celebrate the fact that, despite every sensible reason not to, we did it anyway.

And if you notice my eyes watering, please understand that the building contains a significant amount of construction dust.

The pink onyx may also be releasing some sort of emotional gas. It could be anything.

Just don’t tell the rest of the Goros.

The Grand Opening of The Workshoppe by Kaage Homes

Thursday, July 16 · Winnetka, Illinois

RSVP TO THE GRAND OPENING

Your favorite emotionally unavailable designer-builder-realtor,

Grace

P.S. Realtors, I especially want you there.

The Workshoppe was not built to court your clients. It was built to give you a trusted place to bring them when they need help understanding what a property could become or making the decisions that come after closing.

Your client relationships belong to you. We believe that strongly enough that we are putting the promise in writing.

More on that soon.

Not because we are anti-parade. I am very much pro-parade. I support small flags, children on scooters, fire trucks moving at ceremonial speeds, and the general concept of a marching band giving it their all before 10 a.m.

But we packed up all three children, the dog, and enough snacks to survive a minor geopolitical event, and drove north to Michigan instead.

The kids are on the water. There is a dock. There are boats. There are inflatable objects being dragged behind boats at speeds I am confident their manufacturers did not intend.

It is the Fourth of July and we are exactly where we are supposed to be.

Which is wonderful.

And yet has not helped me at all.

For years, when we did go to the parade, I tried very hard to behave like a normal person. We brought the chairs. We wore matching outfits. We found our spot on the curb.

And then somewhere around the second block, my attention would slide right off the marching band and onto the houses behind it.

A fire truck would roll by and I would be looking over it at a cornice one bad winter from coming down. A convertible would carry someone important and I would be thinking about the person who wrapped a perfectly good porch column in vinyl and how they planned to answer for that. Somebody’s child would hand me a flyer and I would take it without looking, because three houses up, a leaded window had been swapped for a vinyl unit from a big box store and I needed a minute.

So yes.

Michigan was probably the healthier choice this year.

Although apparently, not a cure.

Because even here, on this beautiful lake, with my children happily occupied and the dog living out what appears to be his personal retirement fantasy, my brain has spent part of this morning thinking about a house on Sheridan Road with a slate roof that someone is about to ruin with asphalt shingles because a roofer told them slate was a headache.

A headache.

Imagine saying that about slate.

The lake is lovely. The children are happy. The boats are out.

And still, some unreasonable part of my brain is standing on a curb, worrying about somebody else’s roof.

But apparently, I am not the only one with this condition. Some of you seem to have it, too.

My phone is mostly photographs of houses. Pretty rooms. Listing screenshots. Paint samples. Kitchen layouts. Construction war zones. Exterior shots taken from the sidewalk by people trying very hard not to look suspicious.

All sent from people, perhaps like you, who share my condition.

The texts read:

We are reconsidering Old White and thinking of going with Slipper Satin. I know it is a last-minute change, but thoughts?

Or:

How many years do you think we have left on our roof? It’s cedar.

Or, last week:

Do you have to underpin if you’re digging out a basement?

I love these texts.

They are evidence that I am not alone in my love of old homes.

But I suppose the reason I get so many of them is because, for better or worse, I notice things.

Sometimes useful things.

Sometimes deeply inconvenient things.

When I look at a house, I am not looking only at whether it is pretty. Pretty is where most people stop looking.

I am reading it. And what I am mostly trying to understand is whether the house is telling the truth.

Because houses lie.

Or rather, people lie about houses, and the house is where the evidence is kept.

Let me show you what I mean, because it is more useful than anything else I could tell you today.

Walk up to an old brick house, something built before about 1930, and look at the mortar between the bricks. If it is soft and pale and slightly recessed and looks like it has always been there, someone has been kind to that house. Old masonry was laid in lime mortar, which is soft on purpose. It is the sacrificial part, meant to weather and crack and be repaired every few generations so the brick, the expensive and irreplaceable part, never takes the stress itself.

The mortar is supposed to be weaker than the brick.

Now find the house repointed in hard gray Portland cement, the dense stuff you see holding up a highway. Someone fixed that house with the wrong material, probably because it was faster and the crew did it that way on the last job.

And that house is now quietly dying.

Most people cannot see it yet.

Water still gets in, the way water always does, but now it cannot get back out through the joints the way it was meant to. So it leaves through the face of the brick instead, freezing and thawing and popping the faces off one winter at a time. In ten years, those bricks will be spalling and crumbling and the owners will blame the age of the house.

It was not the age.

It was the repair.

Someone loved that house incorrectly, which is its own kind of tragedy, and I can see it from across the street.

Windows are the next most popular topic in my inbox.

You will be told, by someone holding a brochure, that your original wood windows are drafty and should come out. That they can be affordably replaced with vinyl.

Here is what that person will not tell you.

Your originals are old-growth wood, cut from trees that grew slowly over a century, dense and tight-grained and rot-resistant in a way nothing at a lumberyard today can match. They have already lasted a hundred years. Restored, reglazed, paired with a good storm, they will last another hundred and perform far better than most people have been led to believe.

Vinyl has a lifespan, cannot be repaired in the same way, and will be landfill before your youngest finishes college. And the wavy old glass that got thrown out, the kind with the faint ripple that catches the late afternoon light, cannot be bought at any price, because they do not make it and never will again.

People trade a hundred-year asset for a twenty-year expense and call it an upgrade.

Inside, the lies turn cosmetic.

Somebody rips out original plaster, which is three coats thick and hard as stone and quiet in a way you feel more than hear, and puts up drywall because drywall is fast and a crew can hang a room in a day.

The plaster could almost always have been saved.

Cracks in plaster are not structural confessions. A house that has stood for a century has earned the right to move a little. You repair it.

You do not haul hundred-year-old craftsmanship to a dumpster because the faster option is easier to explain on a bid.

Every one of these things is legible.

A house wears its history honestly if you know the alphabet.

You can tell the difference between a house that was restored and a house that was merely disguised. Between real repair and a fast coat of paint over a problem. Between a home someone loved on purpose and a home someone dressed up to sell.

It is all right there, in the mortar and the glass and the way a floor meets a wall.

Most people never learn to read it, which is completely reasonable.

They should not have to.

That is what we are here for.

And here is what a decade of taking hundred-year-old houses apart teaches you:

You learn exactly what makes a house last, and what makes it timeless, and why the good ones are still standing and still loved while the disposable ones got torn down and forgotten. And once you know that, you physically cannot hand the building of a house to someone who does not.

I tried.

I watched decisions I had agonized over get quietly cheapened by people who had never once put a hand on an original newel post and understood what they were holding.

I watched proportion and materials get adjusted because something was easier, faster, or easier to explain. I watched the things that make a house feel inevitable get treated like decorative preferences.

So we decided to stop handing it off.

People sometimes ask when we became a design-build firm.

The truth is, we did not really become one. We became incapable of doing it any other way.

We have always offered design services. And real estate services. For years, people have hired us to find the house, study the house, draw the plans, choose the materials, and make the decisions that shape how a home will feel.

But when we are also responsible for the build, KC is at the helm.

He manages our trades. Runs the billing. Negotiates the terms. Oversees the timeline. Protects the plan.

All these years, it has been the only arrangement that lets me sleep. KC handles our builds with the calm, exacting intensity of someone who got his MBA from Notre Dame and believes details are not suggestions.

And now you understand why we’ve been together for 20 years.

We are simply not the kind of people who can care about a house up to a point and then let go of the wheel.

So these days we are pretty firm on it: when we design the house, we carry it through construction.

Speaking of building, we have slowly begun sharing glimpses of the work we’ll do on our next personal project. Our own home.

It was designed by Benjamin Marshall, the architect behind the Drake Hotel, and since Home Alone aired, the neighborhood has known it as Old Man Marley’s house. The one with the staircase most reasonable people expect us to tear out.

We will not. Probably.

Every original feature. Every intricate edge profile. Every mark that proves the house lived long before us. It stays.

The disjointed heating systems. The mismatched windows. The dropped soffits. The doorknobs that fall off and the tired cabinetry.

Those go.

And that is the work.

Whether we are restoring an old house, combining two Gold Coast units into one home, renovating the main floor in a French Manor on the east side of town, or building something new in a historic language, the question is always the same:

Will this still feel right in a hundred years?

Old houses and new work, the same knowledge poured into both.

And now, because it is nearly buying season, here’s one more useful thing before I go back to pretending to relax:

Fourth of July marks the start of what KC and I call buying season.

It’s the time of year when houses that once felt out of your price point begin to move into the realm of possibility.

Listings that didn’t sell in spring start to soften. Sellers who held firm begin to get reasonable. And if there is a historic house you have loved from the sidewalk all year, this is the season when you might actually get it.

Spring is when sellers list aspirationally.

Summer is when the market gently informs them their home is not, in fact, the Taj Mahal.

And by fall?

Fall is when reality and possibility finally sit down at the same table.

So fire up those searches, my friends. While everyone else is celebrating Independence Day, we are (also) celebrating the beginning of buying season.

A very happy occasion, for those who observe.

So, anyway, that is my Fourth.

A dock, a lake, several children currently doing something to a jet ski that I have decided not to investigate. I am not at the parade, and it is better this way. My heart was never really on the parade route.

It was always on the houses behind it.

And if one of those houses is about to become yours, send me a text.

I will come, wheels screeching, to tell you what you are not seeing.

And then we’ll build it for you, too.

Happy Fourth. Off I go on the pontoon.

Until next Sunday,

Grace

P.S. Our Workshoppe Grand Opening is July 16 and you’re invited. Come see the place where we help people design and build homes with character, intention, and a fighting chance of being loved a hundred years from now.

It’s only the single-biggest event I’ve ever planned. In my life.

The entire point was to collect RSVPs so that I can relay them to the caterers, the bartenders, the acoustic guitarists, the food truckers, the photographers, the cashiers, my therapist.

I had one job. GET RSVPs.

And what did I do? I sent out a link to Giphy instead. Well, at least you know I have good taste in meme generators.

The Workshoppe still opens July 16. That part I got right.

Anyway, the CORRECT link to RSVP can be found HERE.

Hopefully I’ve made you feel better about whatever mistakes you made today. Not that you ever make any. Me neither, obvi.

With humility,

Grace

I know.

By now we’ve settled into a rhythm, you and I. Every Sunday I send you a story, we catch up over coffee, and then I disappear again until next week.

So if you’re hearing from me on a Wednesday, it’s because I couldn’t keep this one to myself.

The Workshoppe finally has a date.

Which feels impossible to type, because for the longest time this place only existed in our heads.

First it was a sketch. Then a floor plan. Then an empty storefront with concrete floors and a hundred decisions to make. Then a construction site. Then a place buried in boxes.

And now we’re counting inventory instead of studs, and arguing about where the coffee mugs should live instead of where the outlets should go.

It’s amazing how quickly a construction project starts looking like a business.

Not without a little drama, of course.

Three days before our sneak preview during the Winnetka Music Festival, a water tank burst in one of the units above us.

Water came through the ceiling, through our speakers, onto our floors.

The floors dried. The ceiling held. People still came.

But here’s the thing I didn’t expect. Now that people know we’re opening, the question I get most isn’t when. It’s what is this place, exactly?

And that’s fair. I’ve been living inside this thing for a year. You haven’t.

So let me actually tell you what The Workshoppe is, by telling you what it’s for.

Say you’ve been in your house a few years. You know you want to do something. A kitchen that stops fighting you. A primary bath that isn’t stuck in 2006. Maybe more than that.

But you don’t know what to do first, or what it costs, or whether the thing you want is the thing you actually need.

And most people you could ask have a reason to point you in a particular direction.

That’s the moment The Workshoppe is built for.

You’d start by booking a consultation. Depending on what you need, that’s either with me or with one of our designers.

If you sit down with me, we talk strategy.

What to tackle, in what order, and when. What adds value and what just adds cost. How to sequence a project so you’re not redoing work later or spending money in the wrong room first. You leave with a plan and a clear sense of what’s actually worth doing. These are virtual or in-person.

If you sit down with one of our designers, we get into the design itself.

Sourcing materials. Cabinetry configurations. Space planning. The balance of a room, and why it feels off before you can name why. This is the part most people are missing when they say they know what they want but can’t get it to come together.

From there, it forks.

If you mostly just need materials, this is where we act as your store. We help you select what you want, we order it for you, and we help get it on site. You don’t chase vendors or decode lead times or wonder whether you bought enough tile. That’s our job. You just get to make the fun decisions.

When it comes to cabinetry, hardware, fixtures, wallpaper, flooring, tile and paint, we’re a really pretty store where you can get the curated materials we use daily in your own projects.

But if you need actual work done, we write you a proposal, and that becomes a design + build project with us. From permits to construction. One team. The whole project.

Basically, we work together until you’re home has never looked better. And you use us as much, or as little, as you need.

So here’s the simple version.

If you’re doing a big renovation or building from the ground up, you come straight to us for full-service design + build. We take it start to finish.

But for everything else:

The… “I just need the right hardware.”

The… “Which Farrow & Ball white actually works in my north-facing kitchen?”

The… “I’m not sure where to start.”

The… “I only need a bucket of hours.”

The… “I just want to walk-in and talk to someone who can help.”

That is exactly what The Workshoppe is for. That is the whole reason it exists.

But here’s the part that still makes me laugh.

The Workshoppe shares a wall with our Compass real estate team.

Not down the street.

Not around the corner.

The same literal wall.

So if you’re trying to buy a fixer-upper and want to know what it will actually take to fix it up…

…or you’re hunting for a lot to build on, or you’re listing a home and want to sell for top dollar, you can walk from one side to the other and work with our agents, our designers or both. All in the same afternoon.

Real estate on one side.

Design and materials on the other.

The whole enchilada, sharing one wall.

The Workshoppe was built for homeowners. But if you’re a realtor, a builder, or a designer yourself, there’s a version of all this for you.

We built a trade program. For you.

We’re spinning off a trade-only event to walk you through exactly how that works, and how you can put everything we’ve built to work for your own business. If that’s you, come find me at the Grand Opening (or respond to this email) and I’ll make sure you’re on the Trade Program list.

So this isn’t really an announcement. It’s more of an invitation. 🎉

The Workshoppe’s Grand Opening is July 16.

There will be premium open bar. There will be gorgeous materials. There will be good taste.

If you’re local, I would love to see you there. Come open the drawers, compare the stones, ask the questions you’ve been afraid to ask, and see what we’ve been building.

And if you’re not local, you’re not left out.

We just launched a new website, and phase two of everything we’ve been building is online sales.

The materials we actually specify and use, shipped to you from anywhere.

So you don’t have to be in Winnetka to get your hands on the good stuff.

Once these doors open, I have a feeling the stories are just getting started.

RSVP HERE.

Until Sunday (scout’s honor this time),

Grace

I need to set this properly, because the setting is the whole reason it happened. And it really did happen. Only a few days ago.

It was one of those high, blue Michigan afternoons where the water goes flat as glass and the light turns everything gold and a little forgiving. The kind of day where the adults have melted into lawn chairs and the kids have wandered down to the beach for popsicles.

Everyone happy. Everyone accounted for. Nobody, strictly speaking, counting heads. A day with no edges. Nothing had gone wrong in hours, and nothing was going to, because look at it.

Parked at the top of the sand, where it had sat all weekend doing nothing and threatening no one, was the golf cart. And in the golf cart, resting in the ignition exactly where a responsible adult had left them, were the keys.

My niece is four.

She did not sneak. She did not scheme. She walked up to the cart the way you walk up to a thing that is obviously yours, climbed into the driver’s seat, and sat there a moment in the warm sun, surveying her property.

Then she reached up, took the keys in her small and capable hand, and turned them.

The cart woke up.

I did not see any of this myself, which is the great tragedy of my summer and a wound I expect to carry for a while.

Everything I am about to tell you reached me secondhand, from either my own sister or the people who got to witness it with their own eyes.

Lucky people. Undeserving people.

But here is what I am told:

She found the pedal that makes the thing go, and she committed.

There was a lurch.

For one real second the cart took off, the way they do the instant a small foot means it. But there were only fifteen feet between the cart and the lake, and fifteen feet is not enough room to reach any meaningful speed. So the lurch became a creep.

A slow, dignified, unhurried roll down the slope of the sand and toward the water, like the cart had nowhere in particular to be and all afternoon to get there.

My sister was standing nearby.

I am told she covered the distance in a way that would qualify her for an Olympic trial, arms already out, already reaching, to grab hold of a golf cart she would never be able to slow, because there is no version of a grown woman on foot that stops a golf cart with a head start and gravity on its side.

She held on to it from behind the entire fifteen feet.

And again, the fact that I did not see this myself will haunt me my entire life.

The cart rolled into the water and settled there, gently, like it had planned the whole thing. My niece was fine. Delighted, probably. Already, I have to assume, planning her next move.

Once everyone had been counted and the panic gave way to relief, a second and quieter horror set in.

The cart was in the lake.

The cart was not going to climb out of the lake on its own.

Which meant someone was going to have to call the rest of the family, explain in real words what had happened, and ask for help.

This is its own special kind of suffering.

Enter my uncle Greg, who some of you already know from previous stories. Greg lives in the woods in Michigan and owns a gator, which for the uninitiated is a heavy-duty off-road machine built for hauling things out of places things are not supposed to be, such as, on this occasion, a lake.

Greg has spent his entire life quietly preparing for a call exactly like this one.

He did not sigh.

He did not ask how it happened.

He came down with the barely concealed glee of a man who has finally been handed a problem worthy of his equipment, and towed the whole sorry vehicle back onto dry land with the unbothered competence of someone who has done harder things before lunch.

Now, if this were the only time a member of my family had piloted a golf cart into oblivion, it would be a funny story, and that would be the end of it.

It is not the only time.

Twenty years earlier, on that same lake, I was sixteen, and I had a few girlfriends up for the weekend, and we took an earlier iteration of that same family golf cart on what I would describe, in a court of law, as a spirited tour of the property.

The tour ended when we hit a pothole, which threw us into a sharp turn, which delivered us directly into a telephone pole. Everyone was fine.

The cart was not.

My niece, at four, returned her cart to the lake in nearly working order. My friends and I, at sixteen, with two decades of additional brain development, drove mine into a piece of public infrastructure and totaled it completely. At the time, it was a disaster.

It remains, to this day, one of our best stories.

So when I tell you we crashed the golf cart again, understand how much work the word “again” is doing. It spans two generations, and the through-line is not the lake.

The through-line is that every one of us, at every age, will find keys in an ignition and press go with absolutely no idea where we are about to end up.

We are all, on occasion, the four-year-old who found the keys.

I think about this more than is probably healthy, because the grown-up version of it is everywhere, but the golf cart is usually a house.

It is never one big reckless decision. That is the part people get wrong. It is a hundred small ones, each perfectly reasonable on its own.

You pick the paint. Press go.

You find a light fixture you love. Press go.

A faucet, because it was beautiful and it was Tuesday. Press go.

Every choice made alone, in a different tab, on a different day, none of them ever in the same room as the others.

And then one afternoon you are standing in the finished thing, and you’re not loving the result. Maybe you’re over budget, maybe the lights are hung at a height that makes no sense, maybe the plumbing fixtures don’t coordinate with your kitchen pendants, or the floor you fell in love with is quietly at war with the cabinetry you also fell in love with.

Not one of those was a crazy choice. Every single one was a small press of the pedal.

And added up, with nobody holding a map, they walked you straight into the lake.

So this is the thing I have spent the better part of a year building to solve, and the reason I have not slept.

What if you made all of those decisions in one place? At one time. In the same room as each other, where the floor and the cabinets and the lighting and the plumbing have to sit at the same table and agree to get along before a single thing gets ordered.

What if, instead of a hundred lonely presses of the pedal, you could just walk into a design store, a Workshoppe really, and book an appointment with a designer, and walk out with a plan.

A real one. A set your GC can actually build from, with the materials already chosen, already coordinated, already on their way to the job site.

Not a mood board. A map. A shoppable item list for design materials in construction.

Actual drawings. The real deal. Not AI.

That is the entire point of it. It is the difference between pressing go and knowing where you are going.

And it is, if I am honest, the only thing my family ever actually inherited. A playbook. A process. An understanding of how to actually build equity into property.

We taught ourselves (metaphorically speaking) how to fish using real estate.

My dad grew up one of five kids sharing a room in a two-flat on Burling Street in Lincoln Park. His parents on one floor. Grandparents on another. Everyone sharing small rooms with big dreams.

What got handed down wasn’t a financial headstart. It was the map. A way of making a hundred decisions on purpose instead of by accident, so the finished thing is the thing you meant to build.

I have that map now. And I could keep that to myself.

But Swedish Guilt, which I have explained before and will not re-litigate, does not permit it.

So I built you a room to come and do this with me.

It soft-opens this Thursday. And later this summer, on a date soon to be announced, we’ll host our grand opening.

Soon, you’ll be able to come make your decisions in one place, on purpose, with a map.

Or press go and find out for yourself how cold the lake gets in October, knee-deep in your own renovation, phone in hand, calling your uncle Greg.

You know where to find me.

Until next Sunday,

Xo, Grace

And here is the thing: you probably did not notice.

Nobody emailed asking where it went, the earth kept spinning, and my business did not collapse.

I am not fishing for “we missed you” replies. Though… feel free.

I bring it up because it is the single most useful piece of information I can give you about why most people never build the thing they actually want to build.

We think everyone is watching. Closely. With notes.

So we freeze.

“I do not want to post this, it is cringe, everyone will see it.”

“I need to revise the marketing one more time, the tenth time, until it is perfect.”

“I cannot start the kitchen until I have figured out absolutely everything.”

This is perfection paralysis, and it runs on a fantasy: that there is an audience out there studying your every move, ready to pounce the second you get something wrong.

There is not.

As my mother likes to remind me when I start overanalyzing, with great love and zero sentimentality:

“Honey, no one is thinking about you.”

Which is a funny thing to claim this particular week, because as I write this, a video I posted on Instagram of our family and a lemonade stand is somewhere north of twenty-three million views.

Twenty-three million people, thinking about me.

Except they are not.

They are thinking about a moment. A lemonade stand on a street people recognized from a movie, a ten-second clip that made them smile while they stood in line somewhere.

Most of them do not know my name. Most of them never will.

And that is fine, because attention is rented. Trust is earned.

The viral moments are exciting, and they are fleeting.

What matters is what someone finds after they find you. A point of view. A body of work. A business that solves a real problem. Or just a person standing in the middle of the internet hoping one lucky post changes everything.

That lemonade stand only matters because it is sitting on top of years of showing up before anyone was watching. I can reach millions today because I spent a long time reaching almost no one.

That is true of nearly everything worth doing, from businesses to renovations. Nobody starts where they end up.

You earn the right to be heard the same way you earn most things. One rep at a time.

So, in the spirit of being worth it, let me show up with something real:

There is a problem I’ve been preparing to solve for years, because I watch it happen all the time.

Someone has a kitchen, a primary bath, or one room they have been dreaming about, and a real budget to do it well.

And they struggle to find a good design firm to take the project on. They might hear, “The project is too small.” Or, “I’m sorry, but you don’t meet our minimum.”

It is not their taste and it is not their money. It is how the business is built.

When people say hire a designer - especially in architectural design, which is what my firm does - they usually mean full-service: the whole house, taken to the studs, a relationship that runs for years. That is the work I love, and it is priced honestly for what it takes.

But it only works at one scale, and that scale is usually the whole house.

A single room, no matter how well you want to do it, is usually not a big enough project for a full-service firm to take on.

And there is a real reason for it. To make a full-service project work, the materials alone need to clear about half a million dollars, before you even get to the design fee or the construction costs. It’s just how the economics work when you have a full staff executing every detail.

No shade. Most big firms work this way, mine included.

But you should not have to know any of that to get help with your kitchen.

Which leaves a very large number of people standing in a hallway with two doors and nothing in between.

Door one: hire a full-service designer and commit to the whole house, the whole budget, the multi-year timeline.

Door two: do it yourself, with Pinterest and a contractor who is excellent at building and was never once hired to have taste.

If your project does not justify door one, you get pushed toward door two.

And I am not talking about people who do not know what they want. I am talking about the opposite.

The person with real taste and a real plan, who can already see the kitchen perfectly, and needs exactly three things: someone to draw it, someone to price it, and someone to get the right materials ordered and on site.

That person has never had anywhere to go.

So KC and I built the third door.

The Workshoppe by Kaage Homes opens in just a couple of weeks.

It’s not just a design studio. Not just a store.

It is something new.

It is the other way in.

You bring your measurements, sit down with our veteran designers, and describe your vision. We draw it. You shop the design from our in-person library of materials, hand the drawings to your GC, and run your own project.

Your build, your timeline, our eye.

No long-term contract, no months-long engagement, no retainer. A single room or a single afternoon, on your terms, and you walk away with exactly what you came for.

Once you are through that door, there are three ways to work with us, and the on-ramp is genuinely accessible:

• The Sourcing Session - $500: for when you already have the design or the plans and just need help choosing and buying the right materials.

• The Essentials Intensive - $2,500: for one focused room, a powder room, a bar, a refresh you want to get exactly right.

• The Signature Intensive - $3,700: for one of the bigger swings, a kitchen, a primary bath, any one room that requires real detail.

Those are founding rates, locked in for the people who book early. They rise after that.

With either Intensive, two sessions is all it takes. You leave with a full set of design drawings you can actually build from, and all of your materials priced.

We’re known for luxury design. Gorgeous real estate. Natural materials. High-end products. But we're just as committed to making good design more accessible.

To do that, we had to build something new.

Nothing like it exists out there. Yet.

So why am I so obsessed with getting you an affordable, beautiful, immersive and fun design experience you’ll actually use?

Real estate.

As we know, my family has sold beautiful homes for three generations. After that long, you cannot look at a design decision without also seeing what it does to the value of the home.

It’s the reason we did it this way, bringing real estate and design together. So you get agents who actually understand construction. And designers who care as much about resale value as they do about how a room looks. All on the same team.

And here is the honest thing almost no one in design will say out loud: not every house should get a six-figure materials budget. On the wrong home, in the wrong neighborhood, that money does not come back. It over-improves the place.

So the right answer is not always “spend more.” Sometimes it is “spend exactly right, on the rooms that matter, and stop.”

Full-service is perfect for people who want the white-glove experience. Designers on site. A full procurement team. Endless revisions. GC coordination. The Workshoppe is the other way. A design workshop (see what we did there) where you get to be the designer for a day and we produce your drawings with pricing for every material from cabinetry to fixtures and stone. Then, you run with it.

In fact, you are about to watch me use it on myself.

Remember that lemonade stand? Twenty-three million people watched it because they recognized our street from Home Alone.

What most of them have not pieced together yet is that our house is in the movie too.

We own Old Man Marley’s house.

And once the Workshoppe opens, we’ll start planning that restoration, right here, in front of all of you. Every paint color, every cabinet, every slab of stone, every decision.

Here is the funny part. In the middle of building this thing, I realized I was building the exact place I already wanted for myself, because this is how I work anyway.

I collect samples. I compare materials. I sketch and I obsess and I live with the options until the right answer finally shows itself.

Now all of it happens in one place.

So if you have ever wondered how a restoration actually comes together, not the tidy reveal at the end but the hundreds of decisions that happen before a single wall gets painted, stay close.

There is one final reason this has been on my mind. The Foresman.

For those of you new here, it is a sixty-lot neighborhood that our real estate group is selling in Glenview. Not finished houses. Just land. Sixty. Lots.

And it is moving.

Forty lots are already spoken for. Several more are builder reserved. By the time you read this, there may only be a dozen or so left.

What fascinates me is not the pace.

It is the people.

We all like to imagine that the people who build custom homes were issued some secret confidence the rest of us never got, that someone handed them a permission slip along the way.

After a year of talking to one buyer after another, I can tell you the truth:

They are regular people, with jobs and mortgages and doubts, exactly like the rest of us.

The only difference is that at some point they stopped waiting.

For certainty, for the perfect plan, for the feeling of being ready. They just decided.

The people who build the house, start the business, renovate the kitchen, or post the thing are not braver than the rest of us.

They simply stopped waiting to feel ready.

And I am not telling you any of this from the top of some mountain. Everything I am good at now, I was once bad at.

My first real estate deal was a short sale. The first condo I ever designed was a foreclosure.

What changed was not talent. It was reps, and the grace to be new at something before I was any good at it.

So consider this your sign.

Do the thing you have been wanting to do.

And if that thing happens to be a design project or a new home, we’re ready to help. No project is too small. Or too big.

Will we still do full-service? You bet. It will remain the heart of our design work.

But full-service is an enormous lift, and I can only take a tiny handful of projects a year.

It has always quietly killed me to turn down the small room with big style, the one project that would have been pure joy.

Not anymore. I finally built the place that lets us say yes.

You do not need to scramble onto a waitlist or hope you make the cut.

Just by being here, reading this, you are already a VIP.

Which means you can lock in the founding rates above, at the lowest they will ever be, by booking in the opening window later this week.

Our doors open for the first time on June 19, the weekend of the Winnetka Music Festival, so the first look happens with the whole town out on Lincoln.

And next week, when I send the pre-booking links, you are first in line.

That is what showing up gets you.

And you have shown up for me just by being here. I’m truly grateful.

So if you know someone who has been dreaming about a kitchen and just needs a designer to nod and hand them a drawing, send them this.

We will draw your vision.

We will price your vision.

We will get your materials on site. And then you and your favorite GC can run with it.

The Workshoppe is coming soon. And Old Man Marley’s house will follow.

Until next Sunday,

Grace

P.S. If you’re a builder, designer or realtor reading this today, stay tuned. We have special trade programs and services coming soon - just for you.

I want to be clear that it is none of these things, and that the truth is somehow worse.

We are cursed.

I don’t mean this loosely.

I mean we appear to be incapable of living in a house without making it so beautiful that we are then spiritually obligated to sell it.

There’s a scene in The Notebook where Noah finishes restoring Allie’s dream house, the one he built with his own hands and his whole heart, and he stands there looking at it, and he briefly considers burning it down, and then he puts it on the market.

That scene is not romantic to me.

That scene is a documentary.

That is my life.

Here is how it goes every time.

KC finds us a house and gets us too good a deal on it.

Then I make it too beautiful.

And then we stand in the middle of the thing we’ve made, the thing we cannot possibly improve upon, and the curse comes for us.

We look around. We know.

Of course we have to sell it. Look at it. Be serious.

This has been the pattern for fifteen years. I have photographic evidence. I am not proud, but I am not not proud.

Here is what you have to understand about KC. I am third generation in this business. I grew up in it. He did not. We met in high school, and over twenty years together he learned everything he knows about buying and selling homes from me and my family.

And then, because he is a natural born salesman with an MBA from Notre Dame and formal training from a company so good at sales it is literally called, and I am not making this up, Salesforce, he took everything we taught him and got better at it than all of us.

He outsells me now. In an actual contest. With a scoreboard.

I taught him the game and he beat me at it, which I bring up constantly. I am nothing if not a sore loser.

He knows this. I know it. We’re working on it.

So now we are locked in. I blame KC. KC blames me. He sells them for too much, I say. You make them too beautiful, he says. We are both correct.

It is a spiral and there is no bottom to it.

Which brings me to our current house. It is an 1885 Benjamin Marshall.

It is slightly famous. I will not bury the lede: it is Old Man Marley’s house from Home Alone.

We bought it knowing exactly the kind of investment it would take to restore a house like this to the standard a house like this deserves.

We also knew, with total clarity, what would happen if we spent it. We would make this house perfect, and then the curse would come, and then we would have to sell Old Man Marley’s house, and I would have to live with that.

So we did something unprecedented in the history of our marriage.

We didn’t spend it on the house.

We took the money we would have, could have, and frankly should have poured into this slightly-famous beauty, and we put it into a store instead.

Partly out of self-preservation.

Mostly because somewhere in year fourteen, standing in yet another house I could not bear to leave, I had a realization:

And that’s what The Workshoppe is.

It is the place where I help you pick the right house, the right materials, the right plan, the right everything.

We make it perfect together.

And then one day you will be standing in the middle of it, and a chill will go down your spine, and you will finally understand what I have been living with for fifteen years:

The house is too beautiful. You have no choice.

You know what you have to do.

I’m not solving a problem for you.

I’m giving you a brand new one, of a caliber you may have never experienced.

A champagne problem.

The finest kind.

I am, in the most loving way possible, passing the curse to you.

And then, because misery loves company and I have an enormous amount of it to share, I want to take you to Pomeroy on a Thursday and order a bottle of something and listen to you tell me, with great suffering, that you simply made your home too nice.

And I will reach across the table, and I will take your hand, and I will say the truest thing I know:

Same.

With great empathy on this Sunday morning,

Grace

P.S. The Workshoppe opens in three weeks. I’ll tell you how to find us soon.

I want to give that sentence a minute, because I think it deserves one.

It was 2005 in Shipshewana, Indiana, which if you’ve never been is a small town in Amish country that hosts one of the largest flea markets in the Midwest. You go for the kettle corn. You go for the furniture. You go because your mother has decided this is what we’re doing today and you are not yet old enough to have a vote.

You do not, generally speaking, go for a dog.

And yet. There was a man with a cardboard box. There was, inside the cardboard box, a puppy. And there was sixteen-year-old me, who took one look at this puppy and made a decision that my mother - a woman who has vetoed approximately ninety percent of my life’s worst ideas, often correctly - somehow did not veto.

I named her Indiana. I was sixteen, so that’s about as creative as I could get.

She was very cute. This was the entire basis for the decision. There was no vet check. There was no breed information. There was no conversation about what kind of dog she might grow into, what her energy level might be, whether our house was set up for a dog, or whether sixteen-year-old me was prepared to be responsible for a living creature. There was a puppy and there was a feeling and there was a check changing hands and then there was a dog in the back of the car.

What I did not know - what I could not have known, what I would not have cared about if I had known - was that Indiana was about to become the single most impulsive member of a household that already included a teenage girl who had just bought a dog at a flea market.

She grew up to be a black lab. A beautiful one, actually. In water she was a marvel - she could swim for hours, tireless, joyful, completely in her element. A perfect dog, from the shoreline out.

It was the land part that was the problem.

Indiana hoovered any and every piece of food off of any and every counter. It did not matter how high the counter was. It did not matter how briefly the food was unattended. It did not matter whether anyone was in the room. We tried training. We tried boarding. We tried the stern voice. We tried the squirt bottle. We tried, at one humbling point, talking to her like an adult. None of it worked. The pull of an unattended bagel was, for Indiana, stronger than language, stronger than discipline, stronger than the bonds of family.

She got bigger. Then she got bigger than that.

Years of stolen pie, stolen bread, stolen birthday cake, stolen anything-left-within-three-vertical-feet-of-her-considerable-reach added up the way years of anything add up - quietly, and then all at once. By the time she was middle-aged, Indiana was a hefty dog. A dignified dog. A dog who had, you might say, lived.

Which brings us to the pie.

It was a french silk pie. I remember this detail because you don’t forget a thing like this. Indiana cleared the kitchen island the way she had cleared a thousand kitchen islands - and on the way back down, pie in mouth, victory in her eyes, her Achilles tendon, which had been carrying the cumulative weight of every counter raid since approximately 2006, simply gave up.

It did not snap because she jumped wrong. It snapped because it could not be asked to do this anymore.

She had surgery. It was not cheap. She recovered slowly, the way you’d expect a dog recovering from tendon surgery to recover, which is to say with a cone on her head and three working legs and a deeply aggrieved expression that suggested she felt the punishment did not fit the crime.

And then - and I want to be clear that I am not making any of this up - several months later, balanced on her one good back leg, Indiana jumped onto the counter again, this time for a loaf of sourdough my grandmother had left out to cool, and snapped the other Achilles.

The remaining tendon had been doing the work of two. It had also been carrying a dog who had not, in her convalescence, learned a single thing.

We spent months with a two-legged dog. She did not seem embarrassed. She seemed, if anything, to feel that she had made a fair trade.

I’m telling you all of this because most people pick a house the same way I picked Indiana.

They walk in, something catches their eye, they make a noise, and the decision is essentially made. Everything after that - the inspection, the negotiation, the spreadsheet they build at 11pm to justify it - is just paperwork on a decision their heart already made in the front hall.

And here is the thing nobody tells you: the decision doesn’t play out in the moment. It plays out over the next ten years. The pie at sixteen becomes the Achilles at twelve. The kitchen with the good light becomes the foundation you’re fixing in year three. The choice you made on vibes, in a parking lot, in a feeling - that choice keeps choosing.

I have watched a lot of smart people - people who would never buy a car without three test drives and a Carfax - fall completely apart in front of a house with good light and an original staircase. The staircase does not care about your budget. The staircase will not be helping with the kitchen. The staircase is, in fact, the pie.

A project house is not a feeling. It is a math problem wearing a house costume.

The wrong question

The question almost everyone asks about a project house is is it a good deal.

This is the wrong question. It is so wrong that asking it is, by itself, a reasonably good predictor that the project will go badly.

A good deal on the wrong house is not a good deal. A bad deal on the right house - and yes, those exist - can still be the best thing you ever do. Price is one variable in a much longer equation, and the people who treat it as the equation are the people who end up two years in, six figures over, and quietly Googling “can you sue your contractor.”

So let’s talk about the actual equation.

What actually makes a project the right project

There are a handful of things that determine whether a project will work. Not whether the house is pretty. Not whether the listing is well-photographed. Not whether your friend’s cousin who builds houses says it’s a deal. Whether the project itself, on this house, for you, makes sense.

The bones. What’s underneath the cosmetic stuff. Foundation, framing, roof, mechanicals, layout. The things that are expensive to change and the things that aren’t. Most buyers can’t tell the difference, which is how you end up paying to fix something that didn’t need fixing while ignoring the thing that did.

I call this the Assumption Zone - the parts of a house most people assume are working, because they’re not the parts you can see. The roof. The plumbing. The electrical. The framing behind the drywall. If anything in the Assumption Zone is broken, that’s where the money goes first. You don’t put a new kitchen under a leaking roof.

Most people want to pick out paint and countertops. I get it. That’s the fun part. But the order is the order. The pretty stuff is the reward for handling the bones first - not the substitute for it.

The ceiling. Next, remember every house has a ceiling - the maximum value it can ever reach, given its block, its lot, its square footage, its neighborhood. You can build a house past its ceiling. People do it constantly. They just don’t get the money back.

The lot. The thing you can’t change. A great house on a bad lot is a project. A bad house on a great lot is a gift. Most buyers have this exactly backwards.

The math. What it costs to buy, what it costs to fix, what it’s worth when you’re done, and - the part everyone forgets - what it costs to live through. Rent during construction. Storage. Eating out for nine months. Marriage counseling. (Kidding. Mostly.)

The timeline. Not the contractor’s timeline. The real one. The one that accounts for permits, weather, the tile being on a boat from Italy, and the fact that something will go wrong because something always goes wrong.

Your actual life. This is the one no one wants to talk about. Some builds are not wrong on paper but wrong for the person doing them right now. The right house at the wrong time in your life is still the wrong house.

Notice what these have in common: none of them are the feeling. The feeling is real. The feeling is, frankly, the reason any of us do any of this. But the feeling is the puppy in the cardboard box. The feeling is not the dog you live with for fifteen years.

Why most people skip this

Because falling in love is easier than doing the math.

Because their agent isn’t trained to think this way - and I say that knowing full well that more than half of you reading this are agents. Most of us are trained to sell houses, not to evaluate projects. The good ones learn the difference. Most don’t.

Because the internet has told them the only question is “is it a good deal,” and so they ask that one, get an answer they like, and stop.

Because the puppy is very cute and they are sixteen and nobody is vetoing them.

What it costs to get this wrong

Done right, a project is one of the best things you'll ever do. Done wrong, it costs more than money - it costs time, attention, and the version of your year you were planning to live. That's a lot to pay for a house you have to learn to love twice.

The people who get this right are not smarter than the people who get it wrong. They’re just asking different questions, in a different order, before they fall in love.

That’s a learnable skill - and I’ve been quietly building a way to teach it. More on that soon. But even if you never learn it from me, I want you to leave this post with one thing:

Before you fall in love, ask the math.

Indiana was, in the end, a wonderful dog. She swam every summer of her life. She was loved completely and she loved us back, two legs or four. We do not regret her. But we did not choose her in any meaningful sense - we picked her up in a parking lot because she was cute, and then we spent fifteen years finding out what we had agreed to.

A house is bigger than a dog. The parking lot is bigger. The fifteen years are bigger.

And there is a proper order to this. It starts with the bones - the ones the house has, or the ones you’re willing to give it. Everything you love about a house can be added later. The bones cannot.

A full order of operations, if you want it, lives here.

Until next Sunday,

Grace

Technically this is his second offense because I originally shared this exact video last year and 44 million people saw it then, too.

Apparently the internet feels very strongly about children with markers.

The comments remain deeply divided between:

1. “I would simply pass away.”
   and

2. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

Both fair.

But today I’m taking the day off.

Not in the aspirational “self care” way where you still answer emails from your phone while pretending to relax.

I mean actually off.

Because I spend a lot of time talking about beautiful homes and thoughtful design and craftsmanship and investment strategy…

…but Mother’s Day feels like a good time to acknowledge that most women are also quietly functioning as project managers, gourmet chefs, schedulers, therapists, chauffeurs, snack distributors, and crisis response teams inside those homes.

Which is a lot.

So today’s newsletter is officially very short.

Go sit outside.
Ignore the laundry.
Order takeout.
Light a bonfire.
Drink something cold.
Your house will still be there tomorrow.

And if you somehow missed The Great Couch Incident here it is.

Sending love from my happy place at the lake.

Happy Mother’s Day,
Grace

(I know. Perspicacious. I had to look it up too. But it fit.)

And because you’re also a good judge of character and an arbiter of taste (and you are) you know when something looks great. And when it... well, doesn’t. Even if you can’t name it. Even when you can’t deliver exactly the right terminology, you just know “good” when you see it.

I bet this happens to you a lot. When presented with two options, you can almost always identify the higher-quality of the two. In a blind test, you typically choose premium. But you also love a good deal.

And we all know I’m exactly the same way. We’ve already discussed, at length, how I feel about Costco.

Which is, predictably, why building out our own design store has been — how do I put this — a carefully orchestrated financial event of operatic proportions.

Because I keep insisting on the highest quality of everything. Every cabinetry selection. Every fixture. Every finish.

I keep telling KC it’s because YOU, my dearest reader, deserve the best.

He keeps telling me that’s a very convenient framing for someone who recently stood in a warehouse whispering “but feel it” while running her fingers across a leathered slab of very pricey Cristallo quartzite.

To which I say: yes. And? Feel it.

Anyway.

Today I want to leave you armed with some of the insights we use to conjure that good-looking-room emotion in our own homes, and our clients’. Because it’s spring, and so spring cleaning is wrapping up, and the very next step in any spring-cleaning journey is fresh paint.

So I’m going to share my exact playbook to land the perfect paint color, finish, and sheen right now.

I’ll even include a free link to my templated paint schedule (the spreadsheet I send to every painter, every time) at the end. Because, say it with me, being organized makes all the difference.

Here we go.

My Farrow & Ball Hall of Fame

A note before we begin: I am a Farrow & Ball fanatic. Those of you who follow me on Instagram already know this. Not because I think other paint is bad. But because F&B paint has a response to light that I have not been able to replicate with any other brand, at any price point, ever.

It moves throughout the day. It deepens at dusk. It glows in the morning. It is, frankly, alive.

(See? This is the kind of behavior KC is contending with.)

Here are the colors I come back to again and again, broken into the categories I actually think about when I’m specifying a project.

The Workhorse Whites

These are the whites I reach for when someone says “just give me a great white.” None of them are stark. None of them are stale. All of them are forgiving.

• All White (No. 2005) — The cleanest white in the F&B lineup. Truly white, but never clinical. Best in north-facing rooms or anywhere you want crisp.

• Pointing (No. 2003) — Named after the lime mortar between bricks. Warm, soft, the kind of white that makes a room feel slightly older (in the best way). My go-to for trim.

• Wimborne White (No. 239) — Has the tiniest whisper of warmth. If you can’t decide between a true white and a cream, this is the answer.

• School House White (No. 291) — Heavier on the warmth. Reads almost like a soft, sun-bleached cream. Beautiful on cabinets in a kitchen with brass fixtures.

• Slipper Satin (No. 2004) — Named after the silk used in ballet slippers, which tells you everything you need to know. A creamy off-white that tips slightly chalky. Bedrooms. Always bedrooms.

The Quiet Neutrals (a.k.a. The Ones You’ll Live With Forever)

These are the colors people don’t expect me to recommend, because they’re not loud. But they are the ones clients come back to me about a year later and say, “I cannot stop looking at this wall.”

• Mouse’s Back (No. 40) — A warm, slightly olive-tinged taupe. The most underrated F&B color in the entire collection, in my professional opinion.

• French Gray (No. 18) — Despite the name, it’s actually a soft, dusty green-gray. Library-coded. Den-coded. Good-book-and-a-glass-of-something-coded.

• Vert de Terre (No. 234) — Translates to “earth green.” It’s a pale, earthy, almost-celadon green. Stunning in a bathroom. Stunning on cabinetry. Just stunning.

• Beverly (No. 310) — A clean, forest green. Reliable and warm — greener in daylight, more grounded in lower light. A beautiful choice for a study, a kitchen island, or any room you want to feel rooted.

Soft Blues & Greens

I know everyone wants me to recommend Hague Blue. I am not going to recommend Hague Blue. (Or is this my way of lowkey recommending it — you decide.) Here’s what I highkey recommend instead:

• Light Blue (No. 22) — Don’t let the name fool you — it’s actually a soft greenish-gray-blue. It’s the color of a Swedish manor house in a movie you’ve never seen but feel nostalgic for.

• Pigeon (No. 25) — Smoky, mid-tone, blue-gray-green. Devastating on cabinetry. Devastating.

• Oval Room Blue (No. 85) — Named after the oval room in some grand house I’ll never be invited to. A deep teal-blue with green undertones. Dining rooms. Powder rooms. Anywhere you want to feel like you’re inside a jewelry box.

The Drama

These are the colors I recommend when a client says “I want something that makes people gasp when they walk in.”

• Down Pipe (No. 26) — A deep, architectural gray with a hint of blue. The color of expensive raincoats and English drainpipes (hence the name). Iconic for a reason.

• Cinder Rose (No. 246) — A dusty, smoky, slightly mauve pink. It sounds insane. It is not insane. It is, in fact, one of the most flattering wall colors ever invented.

• Brinjal (No. 222) — Named after eggplant. A rich, deep, aubergine purple. Use it in a powder room and watch your guests audibly react.

Now — the part everyone gets wrong: the finish.

Here’s the truth no one tells you: the finish matters as much as the color.

You can pick the most beautiful color in the world, put it on the wrong finish, and watch it die on the wall.

Here’s my cheat sheet:

Dead Flat (0–2% sheen). The ultimate luxury. No reflection at all. Your walls look like velvet. The catch: it’s the most delicate finish, and not the easiest to wipe down. Use it in formal rooms, primary bedrooms, dining rooms — places adults live.

Estate Emulsion (2% sheen). Farrow & Ball’s signature wall finish. A whisper more durable than Dead Flat. This is what I default to for almost every wall in a house.

Modern Emulsion (7% sheen). Slightly more sheen, fully washable. This is your kitchen and bathroom wall finish. It’s the workhorse.

Estate Eggshell (20% sheen). The classic woodwork and trim finish. Soft, low sheen, doesn’t scream. Perfect for interior trim, doors, paneling.

Modern Eggshell (40% sheen). Tougher, more washable, slightly more reflective. This is what I use on kitchen cabinetry and high-traffic woodwork.

Full Gloss (95% sheen). Reserved for moments. A lacquered library. A glossy front door. A statement piece of trim. Use sparingly, like perfume.

The shortest version: Estate Emulsion on walls, Estate Eggshell on trim, Modern Eggshell on cabinets. That’s it. That’s the formula. Tape it to your fridge.

(And when you’re color drenching? Do the whole room in the same finish.)

And now, the actual reason I’m telling you all of this.

Drumroll.

The Workshoppe by Kaage Homes is officially a Farrow & Ball stockist. 🎨

(I have been waiting months to say that out loud.)

Which means: every single classic Farrow & Ball color sample will soon be available in our Winnetka location. All of them. Every last weird, perfect, named-after-a-bird-or-a-vegetable shade.

But here’s where it gets interesting… and where I need your help.

We are stocking a limited number of store-ready gallons on our shelves. The rest we’ll have delivered to your door within 48 hours, but the ones that live in the store are the ones we believe you’ll reach for most.

So I want you to vote.

Tell me which Farrow & Ball colors you want to see lined up on our shelves the day you walk in. The ones you’ve been eyeing on Pinterest for two years. The ones you’re going to commit to this summer. The ones that, if you walked in and saw them ready to go, would make you say “finally.“

👉 CLICK TO: VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE F&B COLORS HERE 👈

Drop your top five. We’re tallying through the end of this week.

The winners get pride of place on the shelf. Everyone who votes gets early access to our launch event in June where we’ll be unveiling the full Workshoppe lineup — paint, fabric, hardware, the whole thing.

I cannot wait for you to see it.

Until next Sunday - from your favorite paint-obsessed pal,

Grace

P.S. Want my templated paint schedule? The exact spreadsheet I send to every painter, on every project, listing every room, color, finish, and sheen so nothing gets missed and no one ever paints the wrong wall the wrong color? Click HERE to download it free. Print it, fill it out, hand it to your painter, watch the magic happen.

P.P.S. New here? Hi! Welcome to the part of the internet where we talk about paint sheen & home strategy like it’s a moral position. Hit reply — I read every email and I will, without fail, get unreasonably invested in helping you create a home you love.

My family was in town. Love them, truly. Delighted they were here.

But it must be understood that when my family arrives, we become a full situation.
Children of every age. Big ones. Little ones. 6-year-olds. 9-month-olds.

A lot of life. All at once.

We visited. We sat on the porch. Friday was, after all, the first beautiful day of the year—70 degrees and sunny—which, as we know here in the Midwest, qualifies as a national holiday. And that energy carried right into Saturday.

So in the middle of opening our Workshoppe, selling out The Foresman, interviewing showroom staff, and designing soon-to-be-award-winning spaces…

…we decided to throw a casual, impromptu barbecue.

And, friends. It did not end well.

It started, as these things do, with a grocery store run.

I went alone.
I went hungry.

I know.

Now, there are two kinds of families in this world:

1. families who order exactly enough food. No one leaves hungry. No one leaves too full.

Like my husband’s family.

And then there are…

2. families who order as though we may never eat again.

These are people who—when ordering Lou Malnati’s—need four (4!) of their largest thin crust pizzas, two deep dish pies, a Lou’s salad and wings. And never mind that there are only four of us eating because… WHAT IF SOMEONE GETS HUNGRY.

I am, of course, of this ilk.

So I went to the grocery store. Alone. Hungry. With no list.

And therefore I came home with bacon cheddar burgers, hot dogs, seven-layer dip, Merkts cheddar, cookies (in case anyone wanted a cookie), ice cream (in case anyone wanted ice cream with the cookie), natural popsicles (in case my sister’s family, who is a little earthy, does not eat regular-people sugar), chips, dips, a watermelon I did not need, and an entire rotisserie chicken…

…for reasons.

Then I proceeded to unload everything all at once because, as we can all agree, it is better to break both arms carrying groceries than to make a second trip.

And that is where I lost control.

Because here is what I did NOT do:
I did not put the groceries away.
I did not start the grill.
I did not pour a drink and assess the situation like a stable adult.

I started… solving problems that did not need solving.

A bag of chips here.
Seven layer dip on the counter.
“Oh, the kids can have a popsicle while we wait.”
“Oh, let me put out a little cheese plate.”
“Oh, she’s been so patient, she can have a cookie.”

And before I had so much as turned ON the grill, I had:

A 9-month-old wearing seven layer dip as a hat.
A 6-year-old who would not be eating dinner because she was full of cookie.
Three children running through the yard with popsicles dripping down their arms.
An empty bag of chips.
A husband asking, very gently, if maybe we should start the burgers.
And a 4-year-old sobbing on the kitchen floor because he wanted a hot dog NOW and the grill was, again, not on.

And this is the moment.

This is when I stood in my kitchen, looked at the unlit grill, looked at the baby in dip, looked at my husband holding a spatula like a man reconsidering his life choices…

…and thought:

This is exactly what happens when people confuse momentum with progress in construction.

(I know. I am unwell.)

But stay with me. Because this is the whole thing.

Here is what I see all the time.

A client comes to us excited. They’ve been pinning for two years.
They’ve already ordered the range.
They’ve already picked the tile.
They’ve met with their architect three times and the plans are “almost done.”

And then they call us.

And I love them. I really do.

But what’s happened, almost every time, is they’ve eaten the cookies before the grill is on.

They’ve made a hundred correct decisions… in the wrong order.

And now those decisions are fighting each other.

The range doesn’t fit the wall.
The tile doesn’t work with the cabinet.
The lighting was finalized before anyone knew where the island was going.
The plumbing is roughed in for a faucet that doesn’t belong there.

It’s the dip on the baby.
It’s the cookie before the burger.
It’s the popsicle at 4:45.

It is chaos. But worse—it is expensive, preventable chaos.

Because construction, like a family barbecue, has a sequence.

And when you follow it, the whole thing actually feels… good.

Calm.
Intentional.
Like the life you thought you were building when you started.

And so here it is, because today I’m going heavy on strategy for you…

The Actual Order of Design Operations

(a love letter to your future self)

1. Inspiration & non-negotiables.

Decide what you love. And what you loathe. As we say, a “no” is as good as a “yes,” because every “no” sharpens the picture of what your home actually wants to be.

This is also where you get specific. Not “a beautiful kitchen.” Instead, a 60-inch range because you cook for 14 every Sunday. A soaking tub by a window because that is your entire personality. A scullery because you cannot look at dirty dishes and also be a person.

No list = grocery store Grace.

2. Translate the dream into an interiors vision - before anyone draws a wall.

This is the step that gets skipped, and it is the most expensive one to skip.

Before an architect designs a single wall, you need someone to translate your inspiration into a program. A real, dimensional plan for how you actually live. Where the morning happens. Where the kids land after school. Where you entertain. Where you hide.

Your home should suit your life. Not the other way around. And no architect, however brilliant, can design around a life they haven’t been told about yet. It’s why most projects start with interiors.

3. THEN the architect builds the shell.

Now your architect has something real to design around. Not an empty box, but a life.

And here is the rule we tell every client, the one I want tattooed somewhere visible:

If it’s not in plan, it’s not being priced.

Do not save ideas for later. Do not “bring it up during construction.” Do not assume the contractor will “figure it out.” Every wall, every niche, every outlet, every quirk of how you live - put it in plan. The plan is the contract. The plan is the budget. The plan is the entire game.

4. Lock the long-lead items: appliances, cabinetry, custom millwork.

These are the things that take 12+ weeks to arrive and dictate the dimensions of everything around them. They get specified, approved, and ordered EARLY. Before the rough-in, before the tile, before anything they touch.

Order early. Or live in chaos later.

5. Lock plumbing fixtures and lighting before rough-in.

Every faucet, every showerhead, every sconce, every pendant. Get selected, approved, spec sheets in the contractor’s hands BEFORE a single pipe or wire goes in the wall.

No exceptions. This is where budgets go to die.

(The faucet you fall in love with after rough-in will be the faucet that requires the wall to move. Ask me how I know.)

6. Hard finishes: tile, stone, flooring.

Now - and only now - you pick the things that are permanent and physical.

These respond to everything above them. The tile pairs with the cabinet that pairs with the range that pairs with the window that pairs with the non-negotiable you started with. It’s a chain. You cannot pick the fourth link before you have the first three.

7. Lighting locations—finalized before drywall.

Before. Drywall. Always.

You picked the fixtures back in step five. Now you’re locking exactly where they go. Every can, every sconce, every switch, every dimmer zone. Walked through the house. Marked on the plan. Reviewed by the electrician.

Lighting touches every other trade. Get it wrong and you’re cutting open finished walls. Get it right and the whole house glows.

8. Soft finishes: paint, wallpaper, upholstery.

These come near the end because they’re the easiest to adjust, and because they should be reacting to everything that came before—the cabinet, the stone, the light, the life you’ve now built around all of it.

Paint is not a starting point. Paint is a response.

9. Furniture, art, styling.

The cookies. The popsicles. The dip.

The fun stuff. The stuff that comes AT THE END. After the grill is on, after the burgers are flipped, after the kids have eaten actual food.

Here’s the thing.

When you do it in this order, construction feels like the fun barbecue that should have happened at my house.

Everyone eats at the same time.
The kids are happy.
The adults are on the porch with a drink.
Someone says, “this is so nice.”

And they mean it.

When you don’t…

You get dip on the baby.
A child crying about hot dogs.
A husband quietly losing faith.
And a house that almost works - but doesn’t, quite.

The sequence isn’t part of the process.
The sequence is the process.

It’s the difference between a project that feels chaotic… and one where everything just clicks into place. It’s how you can do things like build a wall entirely out of marble, or design a backlit pillar that glows from within…

…and have it installed on time, without sacrificing all your pretty millwork.

So if you’re about to build your dream home, or know someone standing in a metaphorical grocery store, hungry, with no list…

Send them this.

Save them from themselves.

And for crying out loud—

turn the grill on first.

Until next Sunday,

Grace

It’s an 1885 Benjamin Marshall home on Chicago’s North Shore. The kind of house that has actual history inside its walls.

Original details. High ceilings. The bones of something that, in the right hands, could become absolutely extraordinary.

And I am dying to get my hands on it.

I mean that literally. I walk through these rooms every single day and I can see exactly what it could be. The millwork I’d restore. The kitchen I’d reimagine. The way light would move through it differently if we just… well, that’s a whole other newsletter.

I know precisely what I would do.

And I have chosen, very deliberately, not to do it.

Not yet.

Not when I have the chance to do something that matters more than my own home renovation ever could.

Not when I could pour that same energy - all of it - into building a place that would help you build yours.

KC and I talk about this a lot. What it means to build something for yourself versus building something for other people.

For years, we built for ourselves. We bought historic homes we loved but no one else wanted, saw what they could become, and transformed them. We got covered in construction dust and made decisions that kept us up at night and poured ourselves into every detail, and it was some of the most meaningful work of our lives.

But somewhere along the way, something shifted.

We could have just kept going. After all, we know the process. We know what works. The easiest thing in the world - the most financially obvious thing - for KC and me to have done would have been to continue taking every dollar we had and pour it right back into more of our own homes.

More spec projects. More development.

More returns that benefit, let’s be honest, mostly us.

And instead, we took a hard left turn.

We put our own home renovation on pause. We took the capital we would have spent on this house - the one I live in, the one I love, the one I desperately want to transform - and we invested it into something else entirely.

We invested it into something for you.

Because our dream was never to live in the fanciest home and have all the nicest things.

Our dream was to create freedom.

A home and a life we loved.

And once we did that, once we were able to prove that good design and beautiful real estate can truly change a life, we decided to help other people do the same.

And so we made a promise to open the place KC and I wish existed when we were starting out. And we named it The Workshoppe. A fitting name (in my humble opinion) for a place where people can work on their dream home and shop the materials they need to actually design and build it.

All in one curated, highly-edited place.

Last week I was sitting with a couple here in Winnetka who are in the middle of designing their dream home with us.

We were deep in the plans - the layout, the rooms, what each space needed to feel like - and we reached that point in the conversation where words start to feel a little inadequate. Where you can see something clearly in your mind but describing it out loud keeps landing just to the left of the actual idea.

So we slid the architect’s model across the table and handed them a pencil.

Just draw it.

And they did - they leaned over those plans together and drew their dream home with their own hands, the rooms they wanted, the flow they imagined, the life they were picturing. I think about what it means to hold the pencil that draws the life you want.

I don’t think I will ever stop being moved by that, and I don’t want to.

And the week before, we helped four families say yes to building their dream home at The Foresman, where our real estate team has 60 single-family home lots listed for sale.

Four families. One week.

Among them, a father and his daughter who both bought into the same community. And now (I swear this is true) one of their friends is looking to buy into the neighborhood, too. All so they can just walk down the street to hang out whenever they want.

Because that’s what happens when people have the courage to chase the life they actually want.

It becomes contagious.

I thought about that family a lot this week. About what it takes to say:

That kind of courage is not small.

This is what KC and I do, from start to finish, and I want you to understand the full picture of it. We help people find the right home, whether that means winning multiple offers, uncovering something off-market that hasn’t hit anyone’s radar yet, or identifying a lot where something completely original can be built from the ground up.

Our real estate team is one of the strongest on the North Shore and in the city. And on the design-build side, we bring the vision to life. The architecture, the design, materials, the thousand small decisions that accumulate over time into something that feels, when it’s finally done, like it could never have been any other way.

The people who come to us aren’t always sure exactly what they want yet.

They just know they want something more.

Something better. Something that finally feels like them.

And that, honestly, is exactly where we like to start.

The Workshoppe we’re opening next month in Winnetka is the next piece of all of this. A place built so that more people can access the materials, the expertise, and the guidance that used to require knowing exactly the right people.

We want to help you create a home and a life you love.

That is, if I’m being completely honest, my dream.

That’s the whole thing.

So yes, my kitchen still has the original 1885 bones and approximately zero of the renovations I have planned for it.

But somewhere out there, there’s a family standing in a lot at The Foresman right now, pointing at where the kitchen will go.

And a client of mine is choosing her cabinetry colors this week for a Gold Coast renovation that is going to be, I promise you, spectacular.

And in a few weeks, The Workshoppe opens its doors, where you can do it all, too.

My kitchen can wait.

Yours shouldn’t have to.

If this resonated with you (or if you have a friend who is in the middle of figuring out their next home, their next chapter, their next big decision) forward this to them.

That’s my only ask this week. Help me help you chase your dreams, too.

Courage is contagious. And we’re building something for dreamers. Like you.

Until next Sunday, Grace

The Workshoppe by Kaage Homes opens next month in Winnetka, IL - grand opening details coming very soon. And if you’re thinking about your next home, your next project, or your next chapter, reply to this email. We would love to talk.

It is early. Even for me.

I’ve already had one and a half cups of black coffee, both of which I’ve made in my Keurig from Costco. I keep it only because Costco has yet to sell a Breville espresso maker, and as an Executive Member, I don’t really buy things that aren’t from Costco unless it’s an emergency.

Which this is not. Or so my husband says.

Now, I’m sharing this with you because I’ll be making what’s called a “callback” to this topic shortly, so it’s important that you know I love to shop at Costco. It is, at this point, a cornerstone of my personality.

Back to the issue at hand, or should I say, the hour at hand, which is now 5:01AM. And what you might be wondering is, why in the world is she up at such an hour on a Sunday? On God’s day? Even He rested.

Well, the reason I’m up and chipper as a bird at this hour is three-fold:

1.) As my husband can attest, I am a morning person to what can only be described as an obnoxious extreme,
2.) If I had it my way, I’d be flinging open the drapes and cracking the windows so we can all hear the birdsong and watch the sunrise together as a family, and
3.) It’s about to be ‘Spring Clean-Up Week’ here in Winnetka.

A week so wonderful, magical even, that it deserves its own holiday.

For the uninitiated, ‘Spring Clean-Up Week’ is the one time ALL YEAR when all the people in our little lakeside village can literally throw almost anything they want out onto the curb. No garbage cans needed.

Big things, small things, boxes of junk, old furniture, broken toys.

And the good people at the Village Works will just come… take it away.

For free.

No charge.

It’s the closest thing to magic I’ve experienced as an adult.

This is the actual description of this sacred day, as written on the village website:

“The annual Spring Clean-Up Program is a free service to residents provided by the Public Works Department. The program provides residents an excellent opportunity to clean out attics, basements, garages, etc. of unwanted items and materials. Crews collect almost anything that two men can reasonably lift from the parkway into a truck.”

I gasp. The joy. The sheer, unadulterated joy.

I don’t have any tattoos, but the closest I ever came was the year Marie Kondo came out with her magnum opus, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Which, I must say, is a title I truly prefer to my own Swedish culture’s slightly less warm and fuzzy alternative, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.

I know, right?

So anyway, there I am reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and I come across the phrase:

And such was the revelation I felt that it was as though my soul completely left my body, flew around the room, and then rejoined me as I rejoiced, book in hand.

If it does not spark joy… discard it.

Revolutionary.
Unprecedented.
A little too empowering, if we’re being honest.

Because there was, in fact, a laundry list of things that did not spark joy in my household.

And when I say a laundry list…

I mean a LAUNDRY LIST.

You know exactly what I mean, don’t you? We all have it.

Clutter. Mismatched items. A junk drawer.

And I’ll confess something to you here and now because if you enjoy reading all my long and slightly unhinged newsletters, I think it’s fair to say we are basically best friends…

…sometimes I get carried away.

Like that one time when I accidentally threw out all of my husband’s Xbox games.

TO BE FAIR, I honestly thought they didn’t work anymore and were basically just relics from his youth. Decommissioned. Like his old DJ equipment.

I hadn’t seen him touch a game console in years.

And so, in a fit of spring-cleaning zeal… I threw them all out.

I swear I thought he wouldn’t even notice they were gone.

I thought wrong.

Deeply, profoundly wrong.

To make amends, I did end up repurchasing a vast majority of the staples. Halo. PGA. And a few others that he said he “might want to play again one day, when he had the time.”

(He has not had the time.)

We’ve moved on from this. But if you ever see him out in the wild, try not to bring it up. It’s a bit of a… sore subject… in our house.

Here’s the thing, when you are a proud card-carrying Costco member, you HAVE to be diligent about your spring cleaning. There’s no choice, really. Because you can’t go there to buy one bottle of ketchup. Oh no. Not when they only offer a giant 6-pack assortment of the summer BBQ special, which includes ketchup, relish, AND mustard, all for the same price.

And how can we pass up the giant paper towel rolls, the thousands of white trash bags, or the life-size remote control race car in neon orange, which, after the cash-back rebate and compared to what they’re carrying in Target, is seriously a steal.

Here’s the thing - people love Costco, myself included. Not because of the supersize everything, but because of the value. And what it means for our families when we can make smart decisions that help us get where we’re going faster. Creating our own little sanctuaries. A home and a life we truly love, with the people we love most. It’s about value. And it’s about quality.

And as a Midwestern gal, I care a lot about that.

It’s why I find myself in the relentless pursuit of creating environments that feel as beautiful as they look. And I suspect I’m not the only one.

Which is why our little idea for a design-build store in Winnetka has turned into something so much bigger.

Because it turns out, I physically cannot do anything halfway.

We didn’t just show recessed lighting. We showed four versions, from good to better to best to museum-quality.

We didn’t just put in flooring. We put in a Louis IVX parquet just so you could actually see the difference between a standard hardwood and something that’s truly exceptional.

There’s a backlit slab of Cristallo quartzite, a crown molding stack that belongs in a historic estate, and, yes, a completely unnecessary walnut fireplace wall and a custom brass entryway…

…that nobody asked for.

But everyone needed to see.

And I think that’s the whole thing.

I’m not doing all of this for the sake of it.

I’m doing it because I care, probably more than is reasonable, about helping people understand what’s actually possible.

About making it easier to see the difference between “fine” and “this is exactly right.”

Because most people don’t have the time (or the tolerance) to drive all over the Midwest sourcing the best materials and piecing it together themselves like I did.

So I decided, if I’m going to build a place for you to come and see what truly extraordinary design looks like, it’s going to be done all the way.

Not halfway.

Not “good enough.”

So yes, we’re opening soon. And here’s the thing.

I’m going to need you to come.

Because I’ve already thrown out all of KC’s video games once before, and this time I’m going to be in even more trouble if I’ve spent the past seven months building this once-in-a-generation Workshoppe, where you can come in, grab an espresso, sit down, and design your ten-million-dollar idea with us…

…just to have nobody show up.

Which feels like the business equivalent of throwing away your husband’s Xbox games twice.

So.

Do me a favor.

Share this Substack...

Because we’re having a grand opening. Open bar, the works.

Because, well…

I think you already know.

Official opening date coming soon.

But for now, I’ve got some spring cleaning to do.

Until next Sunday,
Grace

Curious about our other projects lately? Here’s the TLDR:

On the design-build front, our Gold Coast clients are well underway. The team and I are finalizing the all-important details as we combine two units into one and demolition wraps up. We’re also kicking off a new project with a lovely couple (who just welcomed another baby!) as they finalize plans for a full renovation of their storybook Winnetka home. Our new construction project in Glenview is nearly ready for MLS and, of course, the Workshoppe is in full swing, with all custom cabinetry scheduled for delivery at the end of this month. Can’t wait!

On the real estate front, Amy had another closing this week and is preparing new listings in Arlington Heights, Logan Square, and Ravenswood. Our newest agent, Megan (who is also an NCIDQ-certified designer), won her first multiple offer on a gorgeous duplex. Mike brought in three new buyers who are gearing up to build new construction homes at The Foresman, and KC secured a high-stakes multiple offer for a wonderful couple moving from the city to Glencoe - with a listing agent we know and love.

We have several new listings coming soon (including a darling condo in Lincoln Park), so let us know if you’re on the hunt!

Want us to go deeper on any of this? Just comment and tell me what you’d love to see more of, or learn from us!

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I was in my early twenties, working as a real estate agent in a historically terrible market, and my entire income depended on commission checks as unpredictable as they were sporadic. Every deal felt like it might be my last. On more than one occasion, I remember staring at my phone, transferring money out of my hard-earned savings to cover expenses (sometimes in tears, ugh), wondering how something that looked so promising from the outside could feel so unstable on the inside.

Most of my clients at the time were in the exact same position. Renting. Trying to figure it out. Hoping the next step would somehow feel more secure than the last.

And then KC and I decided we wanted to get married. We wanted a family. And for the first time, it wasn’t just about whether things would work out. It was about needing them to.

So we did what most people do. We saved every dollar we could and bought the only home we could afford: a condo in foreclosure, with an alley view and more problems than potential… at least at first glance.

At the same time, we doubled down on our careers. I pushed forward in real estate, growing from agent to managing broker to managing director. On paper, everything was improving. The trajectory was right. The income was growing.

But the life I had built in pursuit of freedom was quietly becoming the opposite.

I was working longer hours than ever, trading time for money in a way that felt increasingly unsustainable. KC and I were like ships passing in the night, crossing paths in airports and traveling for work. I was missing moments I had once promised myself I wouldn’t miss. At one point, I voluntarily cut my maternity leave an entire month short, something I never imagined I would do.

I mean… who does that?

And while all of that was happening, something else was unfolding in the background.

That small, overlooked condo we had bought, the one that felt like a compromise at the time, was quietly growing in value.

We had renovated it intentionally, using the design principles my parents taught me when developing their own homes and buildings decades earlier. We invested in quality. We were thorough in our approach, cutting no corners, leaving no stone unturned. We paid attention to the decisions most people overlook.

And after living there for two years, we stepped back, looked at what we had created, and realized that this beautiful little condo was so transformed that it might actually be worth more to someone else than it was to us.

So we decided to sell.

We bought it for $418,000.
We sold it for $645,000.

After renovation and closing costs, it was nearly a six-figure return.

That was the moment when everything changed.

Not because of the number, but because of what the number revealed.

Up until then, I had been thinking about real estate as a career. As a source of income. As something I did strictly for other people.

But in that moment, I realized something:

We all have to live somewhere. Why not live in a home that works as hard as we do while we’re at it?

It was my “A-ha” moment. The day I realized that every lesson my parents passed on to me about real estate, design and construction was real, tested, and, in practice, very valuable, indeed.

It would be easy to leave the story there.

But what that moment actually changed wasn’t just the outcome. It was how I started to see what was possible. Because over time, that first project didn’t stand alone. It turned into another. And then another. And then another. And what began as something we stumbled into, guided by wisdom and experience passed down by my family, became something far more intentional.

Today, the homes I touch go on to become, on average, 168% more valuable than when they started, generating six- and seven-figure returns along the way.

Not because I’m lucky.

(Although I would love to tell you that I am.)

And not because I have access to something no one else does.

But because I understand how decisions should be made and, more importantly, how to turn them into a process that’s proven and repeatable. That’s why our homes don’t just perform well for us. They continue to perform for the people who buy them.

That’s the power of true transformation.

Today is Easter, a holy holiday for those (like me) who celebrate. And as much as my family and I love painting Easter eggs and taking photos with a big, fluffy bunny (which we absolutely do), Easter represents something bigger than all of that.

It’s rebirth, transformation, and hope.

Not in theory.

But in practice.

So on this very special day as I sit here after mass thinking about all the things I’m grateful for, one thing that’s top of mind is the knowledge my parents passed down to me. Their thinking. Their process.

Because it’s that same thinking that’s completely changed my life.

And if I can do it, so can you.

No gatekeeping. No agenda.

Just the know-how that helped me go from crying over savings account transfers… to owning a premier design-build firm with a real estate team to match, and the freedom to spend my days doing work I truly love.

So if I had to start over today, this is exactly what I would do.

1. Start With the Homes Everyone Else Overlooks

If I were starting from scratch, the first thing I’d consider is not how I design a home, but how I search for one. The biggest mistake most people make happens before they ever pick up a paint sample or meet a contractor. It happens in the moment they choose the type of home they want.

We are all naturally drawn to what feels finished. Clean kitchens, fresh paint, good lighting. Homes that photograph well and make it easy to say yes. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, the majority of our real estate team’s current clients (probably close to 80%) buy and sell homes that don’t end up needing a thing.

And those clients do very well. You can build equity naturally. You can benefit from appreciation. You can make smart, solid real estate decisions without ever opening a wall.

But right now, in this moment, that’s not what we’re talking about.

We’re not talking about good returns.
We’re talking about transformative ones.

And those homes don’t look finished in the beginning.

When I look for property, I’m either looking to build new or restore. And when I restore, I’m looking for the biggest house on the best block in the worst condition. I want it to be a little larger than everything else in its price bracket. I want there to be room to grow into it, because there’s really no such thing as an inexpensive addition, and it’s much easier to buy the space than try to create it later.

So I look for the homes that have been sitting. The ones where something doesn’t quite come together. The ones you walk through and immediately understand why someone else passed. It’s overpriced. It’s dated. The layout is weird. That hesitation most people feel? It’s not a red flag. It’s information.

And to do what we do you have to know how to interpret that information.

I know what you’re thinking, “But I’m not selling my home anytime soon. So this doesn’t really apply to me.”

If only that were true.

Your forever home is still a wealth-building tool.

Every home, by definition, is a piece of real estate, and every piece of real estate is a wealth-building tool. It can be borrowed against. It can be appraised. It can be leveraged.

It can change your life.

Or it can quietly sit there while you assume otherwise.

2. Learn to Separate What Matters From What Doesn’t

The second shift is understanding that not all decisions carry equal weight.

There is a natural tendency to begin with what is visible. Kitchens, bathrooms, finishes. You know, the elements that create an immediate emotional response. They feel like progress because they are tangible and rewarding.

But here’s the thing. In every project, you have to give the house what it needs, not what you wish it would cost.

When I tour a home and I see that it takes on water, needs flood control systems, has cracks in the foundation, asbestos, lead paint, or needs a new roof, I know that’s exactly where I need to start.

No matter what.

You don’t put a beautiful kitchen under a leaking roof. You don’t put new tile over flooring that floods. There are no exceptions.

You solve for what matters first. Pretty is the reward you earn once the big-ticket items are handled. Otherwise (as my Irish builder brother-in-law puts it), it’s all just “lipstick on a pig.”

You see, every home operates within a hierarchy. Over time, I’ve begun to think of it as a pyramid.

At its foundation are the elements that define its integrity: structure, framing, foundational systems—the things that allow the home to function. These are things you must address. Think water intrusion, foundational issues, roofing, structural problems.

Then, above that, are the mechanical systems, like HVAC, plumbing, and electrical.

Above that are the design materials, fixtures, and finishes. That’s the top of the pyramid, the “pretty zone.”

Never skip straight to the top of the pyramid. Never. At least, not if you’re trying to maximize value. Because when people walk through a pretty house and later find out there are structural, health, or safety concerns beneath all that pretty dressing, the first thing they think is, “If they skipped this… what else did they skip?”

And once you break trust with a buyer, it’s gone. You’ll never get it back. It’s the difference between the “F” word (flipping, which I loathe) and true restoration. It’s a short-term versus long-term mindset. Do the right thing. It’s that simple. Your future buyers (and your real estate portfolio) will thank you for it. Literally.

This is a real text we got from one of our buyers after an absolutely torrential rainstorm left half the neighborhood underwater. To us, it’s worth its weight in gold.

3. Make Decisions Earlier Than Feels Comfortable

One of the things no one tells you about renovating or building a home is that indecision is not neutral.

It feels safe in the moment. It feels flexible. You tell yourself you’ll figure things out later, once you have more information, once you can see how things come together.

But what I learned, very quickly, is that homes don’t reward waiting.

They reward clarity.

Every decision you delay doesn’t disappear. It stacks. It shifts pressure onto the next decision, and the one after that, until suddenly you’re making important calls under time constraints you didn’t expect.

And that’s when things start to unravel.

The projects that go well are not the ones where every decision is perfect. They are the ones where decisions are made early enough to support everything that follows. Layout decisions inform electrical. Electrical informs lighting. Lighting informs how the space feels. And when those choices are made in sequence, they build on each other.

When they are delayed, they compete. And this is part of what separates a good outcome from a transformative one. The homes that produce outsized returns are not just well-designed; they are well-decided.

If I were starting from scratch, I would not wait to make decisions.

I would review plans, make decisions, and then make them the right decision.

Do this earlier than feels comfortable, trusting that clarity at the beginning creates freedom later. Not the other way around.

4. I Would Take Full Responsibility for the Outcome

This is the part no one really wants to hear (I know I didn’t) but I’ve learned it’s the truth.

Ninety-five percent of the time, when a homeowner is at the helm and a project goes over budget, falls behind schedule, or doesn’t turn out the way someone hoped…

…it’s not the contractor.

It’s not the market.

It’s not even the home.

It’s the homeowner.

Not because they’re not smart, or good, or capable, but because they didn’t realize how interconnected decisions are, or where responsibilities start and end. So they take on more than they can handle without a system. This leads to reacting instead of leading, approving instead of directing, hoping instead of knowing.

And that creates friction at every stage of the process.

Building or renovating a home is not a passive experience. It requires extreme clarity, vision, decisiveness and foresight. I’ve worn both sets of shoes in this process. Once upon a time, I was a homeowner relying on contractors. Today, I’m a principal setting expectations for contractors.

And this is why I’m so passionate about sharing what I’ve learned.

Construction doesn’t have to be hard. Design doesn’t have to be hard.

But you need systems.

Whether you’re taking on a major project or a small job, if you’re a homeowner acting as your own general contractor, you have to arm yourself with systems and resources to monitor and track construction timelines, deliveries, subcontractor schedules, invoices, material selections, returns, and more… or you need to hire a team who can.

And trust me, this isn’t some veiled attempt at convincing you to hire me.

In fact, we have to waitlist most of the projects that come our way. It’s simply to say: either hire the best team you can find, or get very organized if you’re doing it yourself.

Because without that, things get messy fast. Blame gets passed. Accountability shifts.

And suddenly, no one’s responsible.

5. Structure Your Financing So the House Can Get What It Needs

This is the part almost no one talks about, and yet it influences every decision you make.

How you finance your project may well determine how you design it.

Most people think financing is just about getting the deal done. Securing the home, setting a budget, and working within it. But over time, you learn that the structure of your financing either gives you flexibility… or takes it away. And in a major project, flexibility is everything.

The difference between a good outcome and a life-changing one is rarely just the purchase price. It’s how you respond when the house asks for more than you expected.

I’ve used different approaches over the years: cash, conventional mortgages paired with cash, and lines of credit. All of them can work, depending on the situation. But the structure we come back to again and again is construction financing because it allows the project to evolve.

A construction loan doesn’t give you all of the money upfront. Instead, funds are released in stages, called draws, as work is completed. You’re only paying interest on what you’ve actually used, not the full amount.

And that flexible arrangement changes how you make decisions.

In any renovation or new build, there will be moments where the plan shifts. You open a wall and find something unexpected. You realize something needs to be reworked. You pivot. And when that happens, you need the ability to respond without compromising the integrity of the project.

When you’re working entirely in cash, especially with a fixed number in mind, those moments can feel restrictive. Because every surprise forces a tradeoff. You start asking, “What do we cut?” instead of “What does the house need?”

And that’s the moment where good projects stay good…

…but great ones never become what they could have been.

And that’s a big part of how we’ve been able to consistently produce the kinds of returns I mentioned earlier. Not because the homes were perfect to begin with, but because we were able to respond to what they needed, when they needed it.

That doesn’t mean it’s the only path.

If you’re doing lighter work, a conventional loan paired with cash can be simple and effective. If you already have equity, a home equity line of credit can offer flexibility, allowing you to draw as needed and only pay for what you use. Renovation loans can bridge the gap, though they can come with more constraints.

Each approach has its place.

But the question I always come back to is this:

Does this structure allow me to make the right decisions when it matters most?

Because if the answer is no, you will feel that limitation in every part of the project.

And over time, it will show up in the outcome.

6. Ask Questions That Reveal How Someone Thinks

Now, some of you may be DIYers ready to do it all yourself. And if that’s you, please know I admire you. The rest of you, those who will require professional help, will end up investing in services and fees, so you need to understand how to interview.

Most homeowners ask about timelines. They ask about pricing. They ask whether something is “included” or “not included.” They ask questions that feel practical, and in many ways, they are.

But the answers to those questions don’t tell you what you actually need to know.

Because the outcome of your home is not determined by how someone prices their work.

It’s determined by how they think.

What I’ve learned over time is that the right questions aren’t about getting answers. They’re about understanding someone’s process: how they approach decisions, how they prioritize, and how they respond when things don’t go according to plan.

Because they won’t.

Every project has friction and unknowns. Even, to a lesser degree, new construction. And the difference between a smooth experience and a difficult one is rarely the absence of problems… it’s how those problems are handled when they appear.

So instead of focusing only on a contractor’s fee structure, also ask questions like this:

• What systems and processes do you use to manage your projects? And how much access will I have to those systems?

• What typically goes wrong in projects like this, and why?

• At what point are major decisions made, and how do you ensure those decisions are made in the right order? What lead times are being assumed in those decisions? Are those for custom materials or stocked materials?

• How frequently have you worked with your subcontractors? Can I use my own subs? Be prepared for good contractors to tell you no.

• How often will we be communicating? Do you keep a construction schedule?

Because the answers to those questions tell you everything.

To those who celebrate, have a very Happy Easter.
Until next Sunday,
Grace

If you’ve made it this far, we should probably talk.

Which part of this had you thinking, wait… say more about that?

Because I’m working on something right now that’s basically… more access to my brain. The real decisions, the behind-the-scenes, the stuff we actually do on our projects so you can do it too (without learning everything the hard way like I did).

But I don’t want to guess what you need.

So tell me—

Where are you stuck right now?
What part of this process feels like a black box?
What do you wish I would just explain already?

Hit reply and let me know. I read every single one, and I’m building this around what you send me.

We’d just left my apartment at the corner of Dayton and Willow, a cute little duplex-down my girlfriends and I filled with flowers and collected furniture.

On our way, like we always did, he and I spent the walk studying… houses.

Row after row of beautiful homes we could never afford.

And like we always did, we playfully critiqued each one.

Not dramatically.
Nothing that required a teardown or a full reinvention (I’m looking at you, Burling Street).

Just the ones with good bones that felt… slightly off.
A little forgotten.
Full of potential, but not quite there.

We’d look at each other and say,
what would we do to make this better?

At the time, it felt like one of those conversations you have because it’s fun, not because it’s actually going to happen.

And then, slowly, it did.

Our first project was a condo in foreclosure that we completely reimagined. Then we did it again. And again.

We started buying homes. Restoring them. Designing them. Building them.
Over time, it became our life’s work.

And somewhere along the way, we realized something that I still think about all the time:

Designing a home is much harder than it should be.

Not because good design is complicated.
But because the process is.

If you’ve ever tried to build or renovate, you know exactly what I mean.

You walk into a showroom, and there are hundreds of options. Thousands, sometimes. Rows and rows of tile. Endless slabs of stone. Entire walls of faucets that all start to look the same after about ten minutes.

It’s supposed to feel inspiring.
Instead, it’s overwhelming.

Blair won’t even go in.

She already knows what happens next.

More options don’t make it easier to design a beautiful home.
They just make you second guess everything.

And even once you start choosing… nothing lives in the same place.

Stone is in one showroom.
Cabinetry is somewhere else.
Lighting is across town.
Hardware is scattered everywhere.

Every decision is made in isolation.

And in the rare case that a supplier carries everything, it’s all vanilla.
Boring. Watered down.
Designed to appeal to everyone and somehow no one.

Which is how people end up with homes where everything is “nice”… but somehow nothing works together.

Because beautiful homes aren’t built from individual good decisions.
They’re built from cohesive ones.

And the biggest thing we kept coming back to, over and over again, was this:

There was nowhere to go where taste was already edited for you.
Edited. Collected. Curated.

As it stands now, there’s really only one way to get that experience.

You hire a design firm.

That’s how most beautiful homes actually come together. Someone like me is making thousands of small decisions on your behalf, editing relentlessly, and ensuring everything works as a whole.

But that level of involvement requires time, attention, and a full team behind it.
Which is why it’s typically a high-commitment, high-investment service.

We know this because it’s what we do every day.

Most full-service design firms, ours included, require minimum project sizes and investment levels that don’t make sense for every situation.

And the truth is, most people do want a designer involved.

They want a point of view.
They want to know their decisions will work together.
They want to avoid expensive mistakes.

But they may not need full-service.

Maybe they want to handle the ordering.
The sourcing.
The heavy lifting.

Maybe they enjoy making the selections.

They just need a place where the foundation has already been set.
Where the hard part has already been done.

Where the materials are gorgeous.
And they can trust that whatever they choose will work.

But such a place didn’t exist.

So we built it.

The Workshoppe by Kaage Homes is opening in May. No pressure or anything, but it’s kind of my entire life’s work poured into one address.

Because it’s exactly what we wished existed when we started.

Not a traditional showroom.
Not a warehouse of endless options.
Not a place you go to get more ideas.

A place you go to make decisions.

Everything inside has been curated in the same way we design our own projects.
Not hundreds of options, just the right ones.

Instead of flipping through 300 slabs, you’ll see the healthy handful we would actually use. The ones that feel timeless. The ones that work across an entire home, not just in one room.

Instead of guessing which finishes go together, you’ll see combinations that already do.

Instead of managing five different vendors, you can design and order what you need in one place, knowing it’s all been thought through.

Because at the end of the day, designing a home isn’t just about picking beautiful things.

It’s about making decisions that hold up over time.
That feel cohesive.
That add real value.

And that’s the part most people aren’t given help with.

Too many choices.
Too many opinions.
Not enough clarity.

It’s a rare thing to be able to offer a solution people actually need.

And in many ways, it feels like a full circle moment.

Because it’s exactly the kind of place I wish existed back when I was walking home to that little apartment in Lincoln Park, studying houses we couldn’t afford and wondering what they could become.

A place that would have gotten me here faster.

So now, I get to share that with you.

So what does this actually look like?

Save this now. You’ll thank me later.

In any amazing project, cabinetry is where it all begins. It’s the heart of everything I do.

It’s not just a finish. It’s the architecture of a space.

And in every project, it’s the part I fixate on most. I dream about it. Draw about it. Pinterest over it. To put it mildly, I obsess over millwork.

You can think about it the way you think about getting dressed. The cabinetry is the foundation. The capsule wardrobe. Then, we accessorize from there.

If that’s right, the rest of the room comes together. If it’s not, nothing quite does.

And there’s so much more to cabinetry than just inset versus overlay. Or stained versus painted.

There are layers of construction and craftsmanship that most people never see. Dovetail drawers, custom hinge types, walnut interiors, the way everything is built and assembled.

Quality is quiet.
More tailored.
More architectural.

And when it’s done well, you can feel the difference immediately.

It’s why we’re incredibly selective about who we work with.

Out of all the cabinetry lines we’ve sourced over the years, we’ve chosen to exclusively offer Amish-made cabinetry in the Workshoppe.

Because the difference is real.

Handmade. Built with intention. Designed to last decades - not just look good for a few years.

There’s a level of craftsmanship there that you can feel the moment you open a drawer.

And once you see it, it’s very hard to go back.

From there, we accessorize.

If cabinetry is the capsule wardrobe…
The stone, fixtures and finishes are the accessories that bring everything together.

The best part? None of this is limited to just one location.

The Workshoppe can deliver materials nationwide. And with our online store launching alongside our brick & mortar, you’ll be able to browse curated edits no matter where you are.

Because good design shouldn’t depend on where you live.

If you’ve been following our story for awhile now, you’ve probably seen glimpses of this already.

But this is the first time I’m opening up early access.

We’re opening a small number of early access millwork consultations ahead of the showroom launch.

Before the doors open. Before this becomes widely available.

This is for the people who want to get it right from the beginning.
Who don’t want to spend months sourcing.
Who don’t want to get it almost right.

Growing up, I had three generations of family guiding me to make the right design decisions in my homes. And now it’s my turn to pass that on.

So if there’s a Sunday Strategy in all of this (and there usually is) it’s that sometimes it helps to know someone.

And today, you do.

Blair already does, too.

We’re keeping this initial release intentionally limited.

If you’re creating a dream space and would like to be considered for early access cabinetry consultations, click the button below.

Our team will review each submission and follow up with projects that are the best fit for this phase.

Request Early Access

Thank you for being part of this adventure with KC and me. It’s been a wild ride already, and we’re just getting started.

I’m so glad you’re here with me.

Until next Sunday,

Grace