Welcome to Life Project Lab – I’m Adriana, and this is the story of how a first home, a first baby, and a total lack of DIY experience turned into this website.
I bought my first home, got pregnant almost immediately after, and decided — for reasons I still can’t fully explain — that this was the perfect time to turn a house into the house. The dream one. The one with the nursery and the nice flooring and the walls that don’t make you wince every time you walk past them.
Nobody asked me to do this. There was no spreadsheet. There was just me, a mortgage, a due date, and an alarming number of Pinterest boards.
The House I Actually Bought
Let’s be clear: it was not a dream home when I got the keys. It was a perfectly normal, slightly dated house with beige everything, a bathroom stuck somewhere in the early 2000s, and a spare room that was very obviously about to become a nursery whether it was ready or not. Somewhere between unpacking boxes and googling “is it normal for a house to smell like this,” I realised the only way this place was becoming what I actually wanted was if I did most of it myself. Hiring someone for every single job wasn’t in the budget — not with a baby on the way and a mortgage that was very much a real, ongoing commitment.
The Google Rabbit Hole
Here’s what nobody tells you about being a complete beginner: it’s not that the information doesn’t exist. It’s that it exists in about four different, contradictory, wildly technical versions, all written like you already know what an expansion gap is.
I’d search “how much flooring do I need” and end up 45 minutes deep in a forum thread from 2013, more confused than when I started. I didn’t need a masterclass. I needed someone to just tell me: here’s what to buy, here’s how much, here’s the order to do it in, and here’s the thing you’re about to forget.
My first real project was the flooring in what would become the nursery. I measured the room once, didn’t trust the number, measured it again, got a different number, and ended up ordering slightly too much out of pure panic — which, it turns out, is actually the correct instinct, because waste percentage is a real thing nobody warns you about. I found that out the hard way, mid-install, with a very pregnant back and zero patience left.
So I started figuring it out myself. Project by project, mistake by mistake, “wait, was I supposed to prime that first?” by “wait, was I supposed to prime that first?”
Turns Out I Wasn’t the Only One
Somewhere between measuring my first room three times because I didn’t trust myself, and finally getting the hang of cutting in a straight line, I realised I’d started keeping notes. Actual, useful, “future me will thank present me” notes — quantities, order of operations, the tools that actually mattered versus the ones gathering dust in the garage.
And that’s how Life Project Lab started. It’s every calculator I wish existed, every guide I wish someone had handed me, and every “what I actually wish I’d known” written in plain, normal, non-condescending language — for anyone else standing in a half-finished room googling questions they feel silly asking out loud.
Who Life Project Lab Is For
You don’t need experience. You don’t need a shed full of tools you don’t know the names of yet. You just need to be the kind of person who looks at a project and thinks “you know what, I could probably do that myself” — and wants a bit of a hand figuring out how.
Whether you’re flooring a nursery on a deadline that isn’t negotiable, or just trying to make one room feel like yours before life gets even busier, Life Project Lab is here to make the process a little less overwhelming and a lot more doable.
Welcome to Life Project Lab. Let’s build the dream home — slightly messily, but properly.