1/8 | JUMPING IN

Picture it with me— 18 year old Cass, full with dreams of heading off to BGSU in the fall to pursue a major in Interior Design. I'm telling someone my plans and their response to me is something along the lines of "Wow, you're going to school for interior design? You must really care about making money."

....Dream crushed.

I used to care A LOT about what people thought about me. In fact, I would say that for a good part of my life I was shaped more by who I thought people wanted me to be, than who I actually was.

So there you have it... one comment and I gave up my dream of interior design.

I love interior design for how it makes me feel. How it inspires other people. How you can walk into a space and feel transported to a whole new world.

Looking back on it, I wish I would have been confident enough to know my own heart, instead of believing what a mere stranger thought they knew about me.

But I wasn't. The week I went to college, I changed my major. Then I bounced around from major to major trying to be anything but what that person thought I was. A counselor, a social worker - none of it was me though, and I dropped out of college.

Right after that I met my husband, Ben. He was FULL of dreams and passion and drive to achieve those dreams. His dream was to open a coffee shop and since I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, I helped him pursue his dreams. We were two kids in our 20's with not a dime to our name, but the hope of creating an amazing shop.

After what felt like an eternity of gaining enough startup capital, we finally started the build out process of our shop, Flatlands Coffee.

Looking back on it now, I'm not even sure how this happened, but somehow in the process, I became the Flatlands interior designer.

Our space is 2,000 square feet and we basically gutted the whole thing and started new. Everything you see, our hands have been in. It was such an intimidating, sometimes infuriating, but incredible experience to design it. I didn't realize it at the time, but in the process of helping the man I love achieve his dream, I was rediscovering my own dream. As I type that now, my eyes fill with tears because I'm just so thankful.

Designing Flatlands was the beginning for me, but since then I've dreamt of starting a blog about design. We had our son Oliver the month before opening the shop and then our daughter Laney just 3 months ago. The last few years have felt so insane between having a new business and becoming parents.

I've kept telling myself that now isn't the time for my dreams; that I would wait until we are done having kids and they are all in school. But thankfully, I have a small group of great friends who are also dreamers and who talked me into just going for it. And Ben, who when I sheepishly told him I wanted to start this, enthusiastically responded "Let's do it!"

So here I am at what feels like the worst time ever to be doing something like this, but at the same time I feel like I NEED to do this. I love my husband and our kids and our business, but sometimes it feels like I give and give and give and there isn't a whole lot of life left in me at the end of the day. I want to stay inspired. Designing is so inspiring to me and seeing others inspired by my work brings me so much joy. I'm going for it.

I will be posting mostly about design, but also about my everyday life. Soon I will make a post going a little more in depth about the design process behind Flatlands, but for now, here is a little glimpse - this is the place that reignited my passion for design.

It's a second home for my family and I love it.