There’s More to a Home Than How It Turns Out
In an 1800s farmhouse in Michigan, currently about half-floored, with three rooms going at once and the rest of it still tools and drywall, there are initials burned into the wood by the front door. Melani and Adam Heldt put them there on purpose.
Melani Heldt, or @Boogesmom if you’re an Instagram faithful, has built an audience by showing the part of homemaking most people edit out. The questionable ideas, the changed plans, the things that take longer than expected, the dirt, the mess, and the decisions her family makes together as they figure out how they actually want to live- all of it shared in an effort to liberate the homeowner today from the pressures of perfection while going through a process.
Heldt's content challenges us to believe that we probably know more than we think and are more capable than we realize. But she's not preaching it to us from above the fray. She's in the thick of it. Her evolving home is her ministry. Her kids are in it. She and her husband are building things for the first time. Rooms remain unfinished long enough for everyone watching to see that competence comes through applied effort over an indeterminate amount of time. It is something you can only pick up in the messy middle.
The Best Part of a Renovation Is the Part Nobody Shows You
That middle is uncomfortable.
The initials by the front door are the single most hated thing the Heldts have done to the house, and they own a duck coop. "I get hate messages all day long," Heldt says. "I'm kidding you not. Hundreds a week. You're ruining your house. Resale value. Especially when we brand our floor."
The beef is almost always about some version of what a house should look like, what will hurt its resale value, and how much of yourself you’re allowed to put into something another person is going to own one day. Heldt never argues that everyone should make the choices she does. She just keeps making the ones that make sense for the people currently living there. "Everybody relies so heavily on before and after, and that's it — it's just black and white. And nobody ever wants to talk about what happens in the middle. And I think that's why people are so afraid to try it," says Heldt.
She then says, "Most people out there are totally capable of renovating a house by themselves. But because nobody makes it apparent that there is that area in between — where in the messy middle you find yourself, and you find what you like and don't like, and you find this sense of my god, I can do this — nobody shows it." The comment she gets most often, under every video of a room that isn’t done, is some variation of when is this going to be finished? She has a standing reply. "Every time I get that comment, I say, 'No, you're actually right on time.' I say that every single time, because that's where all of the things happen."
The trouble with the before-and-after format is that it hides the education required to get there. You see the finished room and none of the wrong measurements, changed minds, small victories, abandoned plans, or three-week stretches where nobody wants to look at the thing anymore so they move on to the next project.
If you pull up Martha Stewart Living from its mid-nineties run, you know what you’ll see? A whole lot of hands. Hands in the frame, mid-task, doing something. Dough still being kneaded. A wreath still being wired. Kids helping out. Process was the content. The finished image mattered only because you had to watch somebody get there.
As modern homeowners reach back for that era — like Dhalsim reaching for the whole tartan, autumnal revival vibe — the assumption is that we're doing it because we miss the aesthetic. We do, and we don’t. The aesthetic is available, more now than ever before. What is harder to find is permission to move slowly enough to become competent at making it yourself; that's what we miss.
We are nostalgic for competence, and because we are starved for it, we keep trying to buy it back as an aesthetic or mood.
Design for the Life You’re Living Now
Starting your homemaking content origin story by drawing on your fridge isn’t the most conventional way. "It was a Samsung fridge I drew every day for my kids; people literally just followed me to see what I drew on my fridge. Nothing more," says Heldt.
Then they moved to Michigan, gutted the kitchen, and let a 1915 commercial icebox move in from Facebook Marketplace. It’s a thousand-pound, 7ft x 7ft oak refrigeration unit with mirrored panels and eight doors. They named it Frederick. "More people told us not to get the fridge than to get it," she says. "I had so many messages. Even my kids' godparents were like, you are out of your mind if you think that's a good idea." The counterargument came from Adam, her husband. A quote he came across, along the lines of If you’re making a design choice and it makes you uncomfortable, you should probably do it, helped put the decision back into the scale of an actual life. What was the worst-case scenario? The fridge didn't fit?
Well, it fit (they made it fit). "I open the fridge, I still get this little joy," she says. Her boys have their own door in it, at their height, for their juice.
And, more importantly, it became permission to keep trying new and fun things. A 1945 post office box to build into their dining room wall. A duck coop inspired by the Shire.
It’s not that Heldt hasn’t tried it the other way. Their first house burned down, then they rebuilt it themselves. The replacement house was built correctly, which is to say, according to the standards of a house expected to sell well. "I built a beautiful house with my husband, and we went by the book and did the most. We built way out of our league for that neighborhood." It was, by every account, including hers, stunning. But it didn't answer the question she was actually asking. She didn’t “want [her] kids growing up in a sad beige house." And when they eventually sold it, they sold it for far less than they hoped. "You don't know how things will turn out,” she says. “Are you just going to waste ten years of your life thinking that you're going to sell a house someday, and you might not? And then you look back, and you're like, ten years I didn't do the things that I wanted to do, because of what if."
That experience seems to sit underneath almost every unconventional decision in their home. The future buyer still exists. So does resale. So does the possibility of being wrong. Heldt just refuses to let those hypothetical people and outcomes become the primary occupants of the house before her family has had its turn.
Seven years ago, a maple on Adam’s grandfather’s property came down after he died. The tree was milled into slabs and divided among the family. The Heldts took one. They had no plan for it. It moved with them through three houses, unused, for seven years. Last November, Adam’s other grandfather died, and they inherited his entire carpentry shop and hauled it back from Iowa. "So he built one grandfather's table from the wood, with his other grandfather's tools," Heldt says. "And both of our kids are named after them." She stops there. "I know I'm going to cry."
The base is 1800s cast iron, off a round table, thrifted for seventy-five dollars. Adam filled the cracks in the maple with black epoxy. It took him a long time and was also the first piece of furniture he ever made. The table sits in the breakfast nook, one of the few finished spaces in the house. "This is where we spend all of our time. Every morning we sit here. This is where we do arts and crafts, and where we dream up our whole house, and where we pray every night at dinner, and where we do all of our things."
A Finished House Isn't the Only Measure of a Home
The point is not for the house to stay unfinished forever. The point is that finishing is not the point. "Our favorite memories that we're having in doing this are in the middle of the chaos, and not in finishing them so quickly," Heldt says. And in the same conversation: "I want nothing more than to wrap up this entire house this year."
Of course she does.
Half the house has no floor. There are boxes of flooring for a mudroom they chose a year ago, still boxed. She wakes at 4:30 AM to check mail and get her Bible reading done before the boys are up, works two hours on a project, and then stops, because the project is not the point, "everything we do, all of the decisions we make, are for our kids." Her mother-in-law grew up visiting a grandparent’s house that was white and immaculate and off-limits. The kids don’t touch, don’t smudge, don’t do anything. She told Melani recently what it feels like to walk into their home — past the muddy boots, the Pokémon collection, the initials burned into the floor, the drywall dust; it felt like children were welcomed there.
Maybe that is the better measure for what the Heldts are making. Not whether every choice survives the next owner, but whether the people living there now leave with something they know how to do, something they remember making, or some small ritual they will repeat without remembering where it came from. What she has instead of a set resolution for the home is a plan for a new video. There’s a clip from when her oldest was two, of shadow puppets thrown on a bedroom wall from a lamp. She wants to remake it — same wall, same kid, five years older, a better lamp.
Melani and Adam Heldt document the restoration of their 1800s Michigan farmhouse at @boogesmom. Melani is a Residence Supply ambassador. She does not describe herself as an interior designer or an artist. "I consider myself a storyteller."
