This week we chat with Joyful author and design expert Ingrid Fetell Lee about easy, budget-friendly ways to bring more joy into your home. Ingrid explains why joy is often more accessible than happiness and how intentionally seeking joyful moments at home can help reveal and refine your personal decor style. We also celebrate Sherry’s recent birthday — she finally got tattoos (two!) — and she shares the meaning behind them, how painful they were, and what finally convinced her to get inked. Plus we recap our latest escape room adventure, share tips for taming car clutter, and reveal a big change to the podcast you won’t want to miss.
You can listen to this episode on your favorite podcast app, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, and Spotify.
New Intro Song
- We’re excited to debut our new podcast intro song in video form — a fun moment for longtime listeners and newcomers alike.
Note: If you’re reading in a feed reader, click through the post to view the embedded video.
- Below are a few of our past musical and playful videos — a look back at the goofy side of the blog:
- We also round up ten years of past April Fool’s posts and pranks, from mock product launches to silly videos — a decade of playful creativity.
What’s New
- We surprised Sherry with birthday decorations when she turned 37. While photos aren’t allowed inside the escape room we visited, you can hear about our first escape room experience in Episode #43.
- Locally, we visit Escape Room RVA — they run several experiences, including a VR option and a kid-friendly room at Stony Point called Gnome & Raven.
- Sherry’s birthday tattoos were done by a talented artist. She talks about their meaning on the episode.
- Sherry’s laurel tattoo features seven leaves — seven is a meaningful number for our family — and the letter “V” honors two important relatives: her grandmother Victoria and great-grandmother Vincenza.
- There are more photos and details in archived Instagram Stories for anyone curious about the process and the finished pieces.
Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful
- If you missed our earlier conversation about Ingrid’s book Joyful, you can find that chat in Episode #130. Ingrid’s work focuses on the aesthetics that create delight and how small design choices can make daily life more joyful.
- Ingrid offers worksheets and resources to help you apply joyful design principles at home. Those tools can guide decisions about color, pattern, organization, and more to create spaces that feel uplifting.
- We also discuss creative ways to style books — color-coding, facing spines inward, and other approaches — in previous episodes where decor and book styling are featured.
- Sherry’s closet and the approach behind it are discussed in a dedicated closet tour post and Episode #115 for anyone interested in wardrobe organization and editing.
We’re Digging
- To tackle car clutter we picked up a compact mini trashcan that fits in the passenger door cup holder. For under $10, it gives us a simple system that’s easy to keep up and helps the vehicle stay tidier.
- For iPhone users, Do Not Disturb settings can be scheduled for nighttime and configured to allow calls from Favorites or repeat callers to come through — a helpful way to reduce interruptions while preserving important contacts’ access.
If you’re trying to locate a product or topic we’ve mentioned in past episodes, we maintain a master list of “We’re Digging” items and a Book Club page that compiles all the books we’ve recommended.
Thanks to Cree LED Light Bulbs for sponsoring this episode. Better lighting can transform a space — we’ve outlined why they’re a go-to bulb in our light bulb resource post.
Thanks for listening!
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