I'm not sure that I found the right place for my husband, but I certainly found the
right place for me and my boys.
So we're three happy, he's still adjusting.
Farm, I'm on a farm.
My name is Michelle Workman, I'm an interior designer, and I was based out of Los Angeles.
We decided to move to Chattanooga, Tennessee after an exhaustive search of cities to move
to.
We wanted a better life for our children and a nicer pace for ourselves, and maybe a little
more bang for our buck.
The move out here was an adventure.
We drove cross-country.
So being in the car for five days with the two boys, that was fun.
A little.
We saw some beautiful sky and we saw some big monuments and stone things, a lot of nature.
We saw a lot of nature on the way.
And we arrived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and here we are.
I think it's going to be really good.
I think they, but I was raised in the country, so I like country living.
They can go out the front door and they've got all this space and they can run and they
can play and they know their neighbors and they don't have to worry about their neighborhood
or their location.
You get all the four seasons in the South.
There's great food, great culture.
It's just that small town filled, kind of like Mayberry even.
When Michelle told me that they, how they came about their decision to move out here,
I thought that Justin must be the bravest man in the whole world.
I think my husband is a little upset that I moved him a little further outside the city
than he was planning.
I kind of understood smaller city, smaller town, a little more rural, okay, okay.
And then.
Oh God.
A little farm on a little hill in the outskirts of Chattanooga.
It's a little bit more extreme than I was expecting with Michelle in our planning.
It's got a big barn and there's acreage and there's pastures and I don't know what I'm
going to do with all that, but something someday.
Like this much acreage, I just don't know what to do with it.
Maybe we'll make the barn a guest house.
What do you do with all this land because there's, there's forests and there's animals.
There's chickens.
It's just, it's a beautiful piece of land and it's, it's very calming.
See, I see all these people see these positives of like, oh, there's no light pollution.
Oh, there's no, and to me that's just danger.
Like I just, it's, it's very unsettling.
I was looking for a house that needed work because I like to put my own stamp on things,
and of course, because that's what I do.
So you know, it needs a whole new kitchen and everything that's in the house has been
here since 1991, and so you can kind of see that in the way things were done.
It really doesn't need any work on these systems or anything like that, which is kind of great.
Most of the money will go into making it pretty.
It's harder, I think, for a designer to do their own home than for them to do other people's
homes because you like so many things and you've, you've been exposed to so many things.
And that's half my job as a designer is cutting down the options for someone so that I'm presenting
them with maybe two or three fabrics after I've looked at 500, you know, that would work.
But since I'm so exposed to all those things, I have all those things in my head.
So it's a little hard in that respect.
So evolving, it's evolving.
The benefits of moving here to the South have been, well, it's slower.
And sometimes that's a little frustrating, but most of the time it's relaxing.
You go outside and there's no noise, there's just birds singing and it's really beautiful.
It's silent here, except for the animals that I hear like in my head going crazy that are
going to come attack me.
My business in Los Angeles was completely referral based, so I've, you know, spent years
just making a name for myself, really.
And that's worked out really well, I've done well.
And coming here, I was like, yeah, you know, I'm, I'm known, I have a reputation, I have
a great portfolio, people can go on my website and look, you know, and frankly, it's been
crickets.
So that's been interesting.
I thought they were going to throw me a parade or something, I guess, I don't know.
But people have been ridiculously nice to us.
I think it was the first day we got here, I got jars of jam and flowers from people's
gardens and fruit from people's trees and, you know, it was sort of amazing.
And everybody that's a neighbor came and introduced themselves to us.
I would imagine that's normal around most of the country, it's just not a very LA thing,
you know, or maybe it's not normal, maybe I'm living in a wonderland, which sometimes
I think I am living in a wonderland.
