When Yoni and I bought our apartment, it was… not beautiful. Let’s put it that way. Beige walls, fluorescent kitchen lights, and a bathroom that can only be described as “aggressively 1990s.” Most people would have hired a designer. We decided to do it ourselves.

This was before I called myself a hobbyist designer. I had my sketchbook and a Pinterest board and a lot of opinions. Yoni had a spreadsheet. (Of course he had a spreadsheet.) Between the two of us, we spent six months arguing about tile samples and falling in love with the process.

Here’s what I learned: designing a space with someone you love is a crash course in communication. Every choice — the paint color, the light fixture, the ridiculous debate about whether the kitchen island should be marble or quartz — is a negotiation between two people’s aesthetics, budgets, and tolerances for risk.

Yoni wanted everything to be “practical.” I wanted everything to be “beautiful.” We fought about the hallway rug for three weeks. Then one night, after the kids were asleep, he sat down next to me with his laptop and said, “Show me what you see. I want to understand.”

So I showed him. Not just the rug — the whole vision. The warm tones, the natural light, the way a hallway should feel like an exhale between rooms. He listened. And then he went back to his spreadsheet and came back with a plan that gave us 80% of what I wanted within 60% of the budget. That’s Yoni.

The apartment is done now. It’s warm, it’s ours, and the hallway rug is perfect. But more than the apartment, I think we designed something else during those six months: a way of building things together. I bring the vision, he brings the structure, and somewhere in the middle, we make something neither of us could have made alone.

That’s the part I want to carry into everything.