This week we chat with Ingrid Fetell Lee, author of Joyful, about simple, budget-friendly ways to bring more joy into your home. Ingrid explains why joy is often easier to find than happiness and how focusing on joy at home can help reveal and refine your personal decorating style. We also celebrate Sherry’s recent birthday—she finally got two tattoos and shares the meaning behind them, how they felt, and what convinced her to get inked. Plus: our latest escape room experience, strategies for taming car clutter, and an important podcast update you won’t want to miss.

New Intro Song

We debuted a new podcast intro song this week and released a celebratory video. Longtime listeners will especially enjoy this new intro and the throwback clips we included. If you missed our past musical experiments, we also revisited some of our earlier fun videos for a little nostalgia.

What’s New

• For Sherry’s 37th birthday the kids and I surprised her with simple, cheerful decorations. It was an easy way to make the morning special without a lot of fuss.
• We tried an escape room for the first time. Photography wasn’t allowed, but we shared the whole experience in Episode #43 of the podcast. If you’re local to Richmond, the place we like is Escape Room RVA. They offer several experiences, including a VR option and a kid-friendly room at Stony Point called Gnome & Raven.
• Sherry’s birthday tattoos were done by a talented artist and have personal meanings: a seven-leaf laurel to honor the significance of the number seven in our family, and a letter “V” that honors two important women in her life—her grandmother Victoria and great-grandmother Vincenza.

Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful

• If you missed our earlier conversation about Ingrid’s book Joyful, you can find that discussion in our podcast archives. Ingrid’s work centers on how small changes in color, shape, light, and arrangement can dramatically increase feelings of joy at home.
• Ingrid offers practical tools and worksheets on her site that help you apply these ideas to your own spaces. We discuss several of her approachable suggestions and how they translate into everyday decorating choices.
• We also revisit related topics like decorating with books—how color-coding or displaying spines backward can create different visual effects—and touch on closet organization strategies that make dressing simpler and more joyful.

We’re Digging

• Car clutter is a real thing for busy families, so we picked up a compact mini trashcan to keep the interior tidier. It fits in the passenger-side cup holder and cost under $10—an inexpensive, low-effort way to maintain a cleaner car.
• For better sleep and fewer interruptions at night, we use the Do Not Disturb settings on our phones. Scheduling quiet hours, allowing calls from Favorites, and enabling Repeated Calls for emergencies creates a balance between peace and accessibility.

If you want to revisit items we’ve recommended in past episodes, we maintain a master list of everything we’ve featured in our “We’re Digging” segments, plus a Book Club page that gathers all the titles we’ve discussed. These resources make it easy to find recommendations and links from previous shows.

We also thank Cree LED Light Bulbs for sponsoring this episode. Better lighting can transform a room, and we shared what makes these bulbs our go-to choice along with a short resource post about selecting the right LED lights for home use.

Thanks for listening and for following along. We hope this episode inspires small, joyful changes you can make at home—many of which are low-cost but have an outsized emotional impact.

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