So we're finally getting to step five. I don't know if you're like me, but you're probably looking forward to having a little bit of fun. Now with the organizing the decluttering, it's pretty hard to do when you're going through a lot of your personal items and you're making a drastic change. You're changing your lifestyle, you're changing your physical spaces, but it's only going to get better from here. On all the other steps. We make it look so much worse before it's over, right.

So this is the step Step five, where we get to beautify and personalize our space. I want to show you just a couple examples and explain a little bit of what we mean by that. Here you're seeing just a plain garage, it doesn't have any drywall up. It's clearly not something that's a completely finished project for that person. But they were embarrassed to put up posters that they had kind of stored away about the anatomy of the body, but yet they use this space as their personal gym. And we encourage them to say who cares if the installation is showing, who cares if it's not picture perfect.

If you haven't These items and you love them. And they give you inspiration and motivation and maybe even education while you're there exercising, let's not hang that, let's just hang them up. Because it's as simple as if you're going to move on and drywall, we can always take them down and start fresh again. And the next image is an art gallery that we're going to dive into the story even more here, they were really able to color up the space. So something that is just plain white, a place where they make tea, they were able to add a lot of personal items that kind of made it feel like home. And because we knew all of the exact measurements of the items that we were storing, and we had already gone through the decluttering phase we done that organizing, we measured shelves to fit exactly where they needed to be.

And then we were able to personalize it with a painting a plant and really make that space pop. Another example that you're seeing here is an example of a photo collage. So a lot of these pictures were up in a closet shelf stored away really cool family photos. But the client was embarrassed that none of them matched. They were all different shapes. And we encourage them to say, you know, do you love these?

Do you want to see them? Yeah, absolutely. They didn't want to let them go. But why would we just store them away in a box if we didn't even want to look at them. So we encourage them to make a photo collage up on the wall, just taking a nice rectangle measurement, fitting all of the photos nicely inside of that and then hanging them upon the wall. So never let somebody else's tastes or preferences dictate how you're going to set up and beautify your space.

Always make it from the heart, make it from the things that mean the most to you, and you will end up loving your space. A personal example of Emilio and I is that we were given an award recently where we were the Readers Choice Awards, we didn't even know we were nominated. They gave us this beautiful plaque and it really meant a lot to us. But we're not the type of people to hang that kind of stuff on the wall. So what we did is we got a little creative and in our closet, I know what you're thinking. Why would you put some up in a closet, we had beautiful blank space.

So we thought, let's hang up there, no one else is gonna see it. Every time we open the closet to get our shoes, we're always reminded of a really, you know, we're very proud of that award. So it's something that's just for us. And it's a good place to put it. And we didn't have to let it go like we thought we would. The next example is, again, just a space in a garage, where a client really just needed to kind of make good use of the space in terms of setting up a recycling system.

So you'll see that there's a spot for plastic bags, there's a spot for the recycling, empty bottles and things like that on the shelf. And because they did that decluttering process what was once originally full, they now have three extra shelves available to put things as they need or just temporary items that might need a home. And then in this last image, you're seeing a kitchen so there's a lot of moving parts in this commercial kitchen. They're a big baking kitchen. It's a small cafe that we helped locally. You can see how they've set everything up with a nice whiteboard to be able to take care of inventory and stock and leave notes.

But they've also got all of their their baking goods, dried goods in jars, everything's measured, everything has a home, if you've got an extra little spoon, you know, we put an extra hook in there so that they can hang that. And it really makes the space very accessible for the person who's using it. But also visually, you've got everything that you need there. So first, you want to make sure that you're applying that practical aspect to it. But you also want to make it your own space and make it nice. So really take advantage of this time.

You've done all the hard work, you set the goals you've reflected on why you're doing this. You've gone through to the cluttering, you've organized the space, you know what you need and where you need it to be. Now's the time to really start to look at the aesthetics. What colors do you want, what pictures Do you want to see? Maybe nothing or maybe a lot you decide