Ms. San Francisco Real Estate (Janice Lee)

How to transform a dorm room into something special   A few weekends ago, I spoke with a lovely mother-daughter duo who were in shopping for some new bedding. The daughter was headed to Kentucky for her freshman year and they were searching for the perfect shade of blue to show off her new school pride. It got me thinking about how bedding can transform a cold, impersonal room and how fun it could be to showcase collegiate looks and dorm room design tips. There is so much to get ready when you are moving out on your own for the first time. I remember being so excited to start my journey at the University of Missouri-Columbia (don’t hold that against me, Kansas fans) as an “official adult” (in my head at least), and the first thing on my journey to adulthood was creating my living space. I was ready to leave behind my boy band posters and childhood bedroom for a life of style and sophistication — then I saw what a dorm room actually looked like. As you know, dorm rooms can ...

Landscaping the perfect garden: Dream first, budget second   Do I need to sell one kidney or two? That was the main question I had as we waited for our landscape designer to send over his cost estimate for the plan he’d presented the week before. My husband, DC, and I loved the vision Tony Evans created to transform our ho-hum backyard into a place we would actually look forward to coming home to — as opposed to one we hid behind pulled drapes. However, before budget realities could dash our dreams – The fountain! The fire feature! The spa! — we indulged in the fantasy of seeing our backyard through the magic spectacles of a professionally rendered design in which almost anything is possible. And we played how much do you think? We bandied about numbers as high as a year of college tuition – for the plan without the pool and spa, which was an option. Adding the pool, we figured, would double the cost. (P.S. We weren’t wrong.) DC had the cardiac paddles ready as ...