‘Recovering Sad Beige Mom’ Says Dressing Kids in Neutrals and Eliminating Color from House Didn’t Lead to ‘Happiness’ (Exclusive)

Kayzie Weedman shares how she moved beyond a beige home with color, DIY design tips and advice to make your space feel fun and personal.

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Kayzie Weedman transitioned from a beige aesthetic to colorful designs, inspiring her journey as a full-time content creator

She shares DIY tips, including power tool tutorials, to help others create affordable and personalized home projects

Weedman encourages others to embrace bold design choices, prioritizing happiness over resale value when decorating their home

Reintroducing color back into your life and home can be hard, especially if everything you owned was once beige.

Interior designer and influencer Kayzie Weedman now describes herself as a “recovering sad beige mom,” having once ensured nearly everything in her home followed the same neutral color scheme.

“What really inspired me was I did so many fun designs for my clients at my previous job,” Weedman, 33, tells PEOPLE.

“I always deemed myself the ‘recovering sad beige mom.’ I was a beige mom through and through,” she says. “There was beige on every wall in my house. There was no color. My kids wore beige, everything was aesthetic, and that just didn’t lead to much playfulness and happiness in different spaces in my home.”

She started adding more color into her home, bit by bit. “People really just resonated with that because I think people needed some color in their lives. That’s really what encouraged me to move on from my design job and do a lot more fun stuff in my own home,” she says.

As the Chicago-based mom of two shared more about her home projects, she received more and more feedback and opinions from people online.

“People have a lot of opinions on color in homes and patterns in homes. They love it. They hate it. They just love to give their opinion, and that’s okay because design is not for everyone. Not everyone’s going to love what I do in my home,” Weedman shares.

What helps her weed through the opinions is the idea that “your home is for you.”

“You are the one that lives there, so I’m going to make my home as happy as possible. It’s been really fun really pushing the envelope on things that are considered okay for a home and living in our home for us and just making it magical and fun,” she shares. “Pretty much anytime any of our friends walk in our home, they’re like, ‘Oh, that room’s different. Oh, that hallway is different.’ It’s just fun. I like to just add color and design and make it a fun project.”

One of her favorite transformations is her son’s room.

“I can get really creative in my kids’ rooms, and I go all out. Right now I’m working on my son’s room,” she says, revealing that she is “redoing his room again because he’s getting older, and I’m doing a LEGO room, and it is going to be very, very cool. He loves LEGOs. He is such a LEGO fanatic, so we’re taking that life-size in his room, and it’s going to be a really, really cool project that I’m going to release soon.”

Working in her son’s room, Weedman gets to combine all of her favorite things: interior design, color and saving money through DIY tips and tricks.

“I wanted to make an entire LEGO ceiling made out of wood. Wood’s expensive, so I got the most inexpensive plywood I could find, and I cut out every single LEGO sheet,” she says. “There are lots of ways that you can save money when you’re trying to do projects in your own home.”

She notes that “doing it all yourself is already a big savings.”

“Women especially are fearful of power tools, and that’s one of the main things that I touch on on my page: I had no experience in power tools. I had some experience in design because I did it for so long, but I had never picked up a saw. I never picked up a nail gun. I had never touched a power tool in my life, and I went online and taught myself how to do it,” Weedman says.

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She hopes that people who come across her page, especially women, will feel inspired to try new things.

“If you have questions, reach out to me. I can help you with different tools, different settings. Number one, learning how to use power tools and doing it yourself is a huge cost savings,” she says.

Weedman adds, “Then get really creative. If I have a wallpaper that I really like, I sometimes will try and create it myself by just painting it. I did a half-bath in our house, and I did a stencil on all four walls because wallpaper was expensive, so I did a stencil instead.”

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Now, after leaving her love for all things beige behind, her favorite piece of advice for people hoping to transform their home is “don’t be afraid of color.”

“I did it so much in all of the homes that I built and just did some of the coolest projects, but bringing it into your own home can be so intimidating,” Weedman shares. “Don’t be afraid and know that you can repaint a wall. It’s not going to be the end of the world if you don’t like a color or if you don’t like wallpaper. I think people think wallpaper is super permanent. It’s not. We can take it down and start over.”

She says that some of the worst design advice is to make design choices based on “the next buyer.”

“So many people are like, ‘What are you going to do when you try and sell your house?’ I’m not worried about selling my house. That is not a problem for me. That is somebody else’s problem,” she emphasizes. “I think that character and fun bring so much life to your home. I personally think that it would help me sell my home someday if I were to sell it, but I’m not going to live in my home for somebody else.”

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