Welcome to my very first blog! I thought long and hard about what to blog about but in the end the obvious answer was to start at the beginning and how I landed the opportunity to start a second career. In reality at the age of 40 (or approaching 40 when I started this new journey) I saw this as my opportunity to finally carve out a proper career for myself.
Like many 18 year olds I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do as a career when deciding what to study at University and eventually chose Psychology so that I could continue to keep my options open for as long as possible. After graduating I went into Human Resources with a view to going down an Occupational Psychologist route but ultimately I never really enjoyed my job, it always felt like a means to an end.
Once children came along, I was lucky enough to take a long career break to be a stay at home mum. Ultimately this was what I had always wanted and financially it actually made more sense for me to be at home raising our two gorgeous children. I thoroughly enjoyed those years but as the children grew older I started to yearn for a career of my own. As much as I felt (and still do) that being at home with the children in their formative years was the best decision for us, I also wanted to be a strong role model for them and for them to see me strive for things both for myself and us as a family.
I had never considered myself to be a creative person, I certainly didn’t excel in Art at school. Funnily enough my first inkling of thinking of myself as creative was when I started making the children their birthday cakes. I had, however, always had an interest (or a nosiness!) in people’s homes and accompanied my mum to the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour and Decorex for a number of years. Although it wasn’t until we had undertaken our own extension project and unlike most people who cannot wait for all the decision making to be over, found myself feeling disappointed that it was over that I made the decision that perhaps Interior Design would be the career for me.
In hindsight, the signs had always been there…I was forever moving my bedroom around when I was growing up and was very proud of my yellow & blue Austrian blind! I am not sure there would have been many 7 years olds who even knew what an Austrian blind was, even back in the 80’s!
So with the decision made that I was to pursue a career in Interior Design, in September 2016 I signed up to a Diploma course in Interior Design with The British Academy of Interior Design. The rest, as they say, is history!
In my next blog I shall share some of my experiences on my course and how I choose my pathway into specialising in curtains, blinds and soft furnishings.
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog, I hope that you enjoyed it and please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or suggestions on ideas for future posts.