Hi, I’m Ella Gardner.

How a cracked sink turned into a spreadsheet, then a website

My husband and I bought a 1970s fixer-upper outside Portland in 2018. Every fixture in that house — the shower rod, the faucets, the cabinet hardware — was original to the house and quietly falling apart. We couldn’t afford a contractor for every room, so I started doing the math myself, one weekend project at a time. The first thing I learned was that almost nothing in a house is “one size fits all,” no matter what the box says.

After replacing the same shower curtain rod twice in one month because I’d guessed at the height instead of measuring for our ceiling, I started keeping a spreadsheet. Every fixture got its own row: exact measurements, material specs, what actually held up after six months of real use. Six years and three home renovations later, that spreadsheet has grown into a catalog of specs on more than 200 products I’ve personally installed, tested, or replaced — including a kitchen faucet that’s still going strong after four years, and a porcelain sink that didn’t survive four months.

That sink is still the project I think about most. I installed a budget porcelain sink in our kids’ bathroom because it looked fine and cost less. It cracked within three months from regular use — not abuse, just daily life with two kids. That repair cost me $280 in materials and an entire weekend I hadn’t planned on losing. After that, I stopped trusting “looks durable” and started trusting actual material specs and weight tolerances instead.

Once my neighbors found out I’d basically renovated three rooms by myself, the texts started. “What height should I hang my curtain rod?” “Is this faucet actually deck-mount or wall-mount?” My sister called me before her own bathroom remodel just to ask what not to buy. I started writing the answers down so I’d stop typing the same measurements over and over — and Lyla Decor grew out of that habit.

Most home decor advice falls into one of two camps: it’s either “just make it pretty and trust your eye,” with no actual numbers, or it’s written for contractors and assumes you already know the terminology. I write for the person in between — someone who wants the exact height, the actual material breakdown, and the real trade-offs, explained the way I’d explain it to my sister on the phone.

If you’re standing in your bathroom right now trying to figure out whether your ceiling is “high” or “standard,” or staring at a sink material chart wondering which one will actually survive your household — I’ve been exactly there, tape measure in hand. I write Lyla Decor so you don’t have to learn these things the expensive way, like I did.
Thanks for stopping by.
— Ella