I almost talked myself out of this.
I’ve been building my personal brand for a while now. It’s shifted more than a couple of times but that’s as many as I’m willing to admit. But somewhere in the middle of strategizing my current direction it started feeling a little stale. Slow. Not as fun as it used to be.
Then my mother told me she wanted to extend the tiny home in the backyard and asked me to look up some ideas. Simple enough. Except there was one constraint that made everything harder than it needed to be. The plumbing is built into the cement slab so relocating the bathroom wasn’t an option without a very expensive conversation. Every plan I liked worked against that one fixed point.
So I decided to just design it myself.
I asked Claude to generate a scaled floor plan grid, 24 by 32 feet, one square per foot. I dropped it into Procreate and started sketching. My drawing isn’t anything to brag about but I got the idea out of my head and onto the page. I built around the bathroom since that was non negotiable and figured out everything else from there. Solving that constraint didn’t frustrate me. It actually felt good. That probably should have told me something.
From the sketch I moved into LucidChart, a free floor plan app, and built a cleaner version using my drawing as a reference. Then I took it to Nano Banana and had it render a realistic top down 3D view. Seeing something I designed look that real stopped me for a second. I sat there like wait, I did that.
Then I wanted more. I found a SketchUp tutorial, started watching it, and just began building the model while I learned. There’s a learning curve and I won’t pretend my first draft is perfect but seeing the space in three dimensions changed how I understood it. I could finally feel the rooms.
I haven’t had this much fun since my early photography days. That feeling of having a vision and then pulling it into reality piece by piece. I didn’t expect to enjoy this as much as I did and I definitely didn’t expect to still be going.
Here’s the thing though. I have a habit of turning hobbies into careers and I’ve been trying to correct that. So when this started feeling obsessive I got suspicious of myself. But then I started connecting dots I hadn’t noticed before. The interior design courses I took years ago. Every episode of Fixer Upper and Dream Home Makeover. Designing Miami twice. Alexandra Gater, Daniel Titchener, and Reynard Lowell on rotation. An Elle Decor subscription I honestly don’t remember starting. A trip to the Silos in Waco that I somehow filed under “just a fun trip.”
That’s not a phase. That’s a through line I just hadn’t named yet.
The city approved the project this week. So now it’s real.
I’m going to document all of it here on here and over on instagram at MalikSpaces. The design decisions, the mistakes, the materials, the moments where it comes together and the ones where it doesn’t. I don’t know exactly where this leads but for the first time in a while I’m not worried about the destination. I’m just happy to be building something again.
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