I Wrote a Book
It has been a very long time since I have written a blog post. I almost did not remember how to get to the the page to write a new post. It definitely took a minute to get back in the swing of things.
I have started a Substack which I try to post on, I haven't been doing much of that lately either, though. I need to be better about that because I really enjoy writing about random things and, of course, home design.
I am going to post here what I posted on Substack yesterday.....
The book that I wrote is called THE SIXTH HOUSE and it's mostly about the renovation story of my current home and my love of home design in general.
Last July, my husband was out of town for two weeks for work and my son was away at a camp in Colorado and I decided to fill my alone time by deep cleaning the house, picking flowers from around my yard and placing them in vases all around, and taking pictures of every room in my house. We had completed all but one* of the renovation projects on our list from when we moved into our house in 2020 and I thought, I will write and self publish a book about the house. How hard can that be?
It is no longer the house we moved into, every space has been touched and it is quite the transformation, if I do say so myself. It has gone from being a house that I was not super excited about living in to a house that I am grateful for every time I walk through its rooms.
I approached the design of this house from the perspective of doing what I wanted to do, for my family, and for once without the driving force of my design decisions being made from an eye towards resale. It was fun and I love the results. When it does come time to sell this house, I hope others love it as much as we do.
I wrote the book in phases. I started with the introduction and sent it to my brother Kevin and asked him what he thought. Kevin is the first person I told about the book and he has been incredibly supportive and encouraging. He propelled me to keep going.
I made a list of ideas for chapters and put together an outline and got to work on writing and selecting photos. I was far enough along by Thanksgiving 2025 to tell the rest of my family, beyond Kevin, about it and they too became my cheerleaders and helped propel me to the finish line.
I ordered my first review copy on March 8, 2026 and asked my older daughter and my husband to read through it and give me their thoughts and edits. My daughter helped me tremendously with making the book more visually appealing. The first copy was more like: "look, I did it, it's all out there" without enough focus on the best fonts and layouts.
I revised the book and ordered review copies ten more times. When I thought I was ready to list it for sale on Amazon, I found out that the maximum number of pages was 240 and the book was currently at 264 pages. I edited and revised and reduced and tried again. I was at 236 pages. I then learned that for the publishing site, the total page numbers need to be divisible by 12. It was pure coincidence that 264 is divisible by 12 and therefore I never received that warning message before. I went back to editing, revising, and reducing and got the book to 228 pages. Divisible by 12 nineteen times. Phew.
I submitted my book to Amazon for review yesterday morning (Monday, November 9th). It takes up to three weeks for a book to be accepted so hopefully THE SIXTH HOUSE is out there soon!
I am really happy with the book. The only thing that is dissapointing me is that the book is going to be much more expensive than I expected it to be. There are printing fees for the publisher and fees to Amazon that bring the cost of the book to $136.50.
I hope that the price point is not a complete turn off to people scrolling on Amazon. THE SIXTH HOUSE has great information. I have included all of my sources for my home and also detailed all of the building blocks I use to create my spaces. I even try to be entertaining and funny!
I will check back in when the book is live!
Thank you for being here,
Kerry
*we have yet to renovate the master bathroom, although we just started demo for that project
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