To paint or not?

Colour is important to Sarah and that goes for the kids’ rooms, too. Phoebe’s room is a beautiful turquoise and purple, and 10-year-old Quillan’s room has a bright green wall that brings in nature from outside.

“This is the third home where we’ve painted, so we’ve got quite a bit of experience with colouring walls. It really brightens the home and makes it feel less rented, so I love doing it. You have to get permission from your landlord and then return the walls back to white when you leave. Shaun and I usually do the painting ourselves, but with this last move, I was so exhausted and busy that we hired a painter. It cost us $200 to have the kids’ rooms painted – so worth it.”

Isabelle designed the family room, too, charged with making it a cross between a study and an art/ play room with easy access to materials for all. Before the pandemic, the kids used the family room a lot. It was Phoebe’s sanctuary where she spent most of her weekend doing her art and her Zoom classes with Centre Stage. Since then, Sarah has used it as her office. She jokes that it could now be called the Zoom Room. There’s an Ikea couch in there, too, but she ordered a velvet cover from Comfort Works, a vendor she found online, to give it a more custom feel. The walls are covered with photos in Ikea frames – a homage to favourite travels: Quillan with a kangaroo in Australia; snow monkeys in Nagano; monks in Myanmar and more. Again, the photos make the home feel more personal and permanent. But the bookcases are the real star of the room. Sarah had them built for the space, but they’re modular and can be made shorter so that if they move house, the bookcases can come with them.