Makeover By Monday's Jenni Yolo Makes High-Impact Renovations On A Budget - Exclusive Interview
Let's get real: While the idea of doing a total makeover of your home — or part of it — sounds glamorous, the reality is anything but. If you're lucky enough to have an unlimited budget for labor and materials, you'll still be faced with weeks to months, of dust, noise, and inconvenience. Unless you're fully confident about your design intuition, you may spend much of that time wondering if you'll regret the end results.
If you're wondering if it's possible to pull off a satisfying refresh of a space in your home without a lot of time, money, or drama, Jenny Yolo can tell you the answer is a definite "yes." A lifelong crafter and DIY-er, Jenny Yolo has been enthusiastically making things and reshaping her environment since childhood. Any object she could find in her parents' home while growing up became potential material for a new project. In each episode of her Magnolia show "Makeover by Monday," she walks viewers through her latest design challenge, which always involves pulling off a complete makeover of a room or two between Friday and Monday.
With strategic use of color and found and made objects, she creates spaces that look amazing and celebrate the tastes and lives of the people living in the spaces. In this exclusive interview, Yolo shares her journey as well as what to expect as Season 2 of "Makeover by Monday" launches.
For Jenny Yolo, making things has been a lifelong passion
First of all, I know that you discovered your love of decorating when you were quite young, so could you tell me how you got attracted to it and what you liked about it?
Growing up, I was always a DIYer. Anything that I could create, I did. My mom and my dad saw that I was a really creative kid, so they really helped foster that. There was a neighborhood park that I would always go to, and they always had crafts. I would take all the sheets off our beds and go tie-dye them and bring them back and be like, "Surprise! I decorated the space." I found that love for crafting when I was really little and got a lot of satisfaction.
Can you tell me a bit about your professional journey? You started off as a blogger, so how did you expand your business from there?
I was always creative, and then I moved to New York after college and worked at InStyle magazine, and I couldn't afford a lot of the fashion that was there, so I started crafting my own fashion and recreating the looks I saw on the runway for little to no money because I didn't have any. Then, the editors actually saw that, and they gave me a DIY column. I started doing DIY fashion at the magazine while I lived in New York. After living in New York for about eight years, and I had started I SPY DIY, my blog, I moved back to Wisconsin and got my first studio space. I fell in love with DIY home décor at that space.
I started playing around with DIY projects, DIY home décor. I found out about this fixer upper from my florist. It was a house in Milwaukee on sale for $24,000. I had never taken on a project like that, and my now-husband encouraged me to try it. I got this house for $24,000 and renovated it and made all the mistakes in the best way possible and fell in love with the process of renovating, the process of creating DIY décor. That started this whole process.
She finished filming Season 2 while eight months pregnant
How did "Makeover by Monday" come about?
I've been doing DIY home now for about eight years, ever since I moved back to Milwaukee. Magnolia saw me on Instagram and asked me to do some DIY workshops for them. We did a series of DIY workshops called "Handmade Home" for the launch of the app. From there, they liked my DIY style and asked me if I would do a show. It is the perfect concept for me, because we love doing these quick makeovers, and it's fun for me to work on a really tight budget and a really tight timeline. I like working in spaces where I have to get creative with what I'm given. It was really fun that this concept incorporated all those things that I love.
You're starting your second season now. What have you changed, if anything, since your last season?
The big thing that changed from last season to this season is I'm in my third trimester pregnant during filming. We finished up about three weeks before I had my baby. I hit my creative stride when I was that pregnant. I felt really excited about the designs that we did this season. I tried to throw out everything that I've done in the past and come up with new, fresh concepts, dabble in other genres like mid-century modern, stuff that I haven't really done before, like find new colors and get bold with the paint colors and the patterns. That was something that I did different this season, and the added element of me being pregnant while doing these three-day makeovers was very interesting, but also very fun.
What was it like doing all of this when you were pregnant? Was it hard for you?
It actually was okay, because we had the exact same team that we had the year before. The team is my husband, David, two buddies that David went to college with, [and] my father-in-law. We had my assistant along with us for this ride. Since the team was established last season, and we all worked so well together because we're friends and family, it was nice having that same team this year so I could trust them with my designs if I needed to sit down and put my feet up for a little bit. They know how to execute the vision for each space.
She trusts her gut feelings to guide her design process
Can you tell me a bit about your creative process? When you walk into a room, how do you come up with the ideas for the space?
Whenever I see a space, when a client reaches out to us for a space, I either immediately have a vision for it or I don't. I love the ones that I immediately have a vision for, because I know the direction I want to go. It's fun then talking to the client and seeing what they're interested in so I can pull in their personal story. I can pull in some things that they like. It's a gut instinct when I first see a room, if I know that I'll have a creative vision for it. My big thing is incorporating a ton of vintage pieces, a ton of thrifted stuff, and making a space feel really reflected and homey and bringing in personal touches from the client.
Following up on that, I know that you use a lot of thrifted objects and a lot of found objects. When you're looking around for stuff, how could you tell what objects will be potentially useful for a future project?
I'm very happy that we have a workshop that has a ton of storage space because I tend to buy things that bring me joy and things that I find really interesting. It's fun to see how they end up getting used throughout the season. Some pieces I buy with the specific place it's going to go. I know exactly what room I want it in and what design I want it in. Other pieces organically find their way into rooms. Sometimes, they make the entire room at the end.
A lot of time, I also like to find a thrifted or an antique piece that becomes my muse for that space. We're talking about creative process, and sometimes I use a piece as the muse and I base the color palette and the design all off that piece. Sometimes I do it with a rug or a piece of art, but that can establish what the entire design of the room is going to look like.
She experiments with a lot of new techniques and design strategies in Season 2
Can you share some of your favorite tips for homeowners who want to refresh a space? What should they focus on and what things should they avoid doing?
The power of paint is amazing. You can totally change the look of a room with paint. I'd also say the same about trim, adding crown molding or a chair rail or beadboard that can totally transform a room and give it a lot of character. A lot of the time, it doesn't cost a lot of money. Adding chair rail is a really inexpensive and great DIY project.
The other thing is to bring in pieces that you love and that are unique. Adding vintage pieces or thrifted pieces, that is going to create a room that you love and is unique to you and doesn't look like what everyone else is doing. You'll know when you see pieces, when you're out and about going to secondhand stores. If you're drawn to it, get it and use that as the jumping off point for decorating a room.
How do you keep yourself calm when you're working on big projects on a rather short timeline?
Since we know that we only have three days to do these projects, I like to go into them as prepared as I possibly can. I come up with a design, and I get all the pieces and I have the large workshop full of antiques that I can pull from. I try to go into them as prepared as I possibly can, and that way, it cuts down on any of the stress, but there's still stressful moments.
We're doing a lot of techniques this season that we've never done before, because I really wanted to push the team. You'd think, being nine months pregnant at the end of this, I'd go easy, but I definitely pushed the team this season. I pushed the crew this season to create interesting, beautiful designs and to try new techniques. Things can go wrong, especially when we're trying a DIY technique for the first time and there's really no room for error, that can be a little stressful.
It goes back to the trust that I have in the crew and the fact that we're such a close-knit crew and we're friends and family. I have to put my trust in them and I put my trust in my creative process and thankfully, everyone worked out.
Season 2 of "Makeover by Monday" premieres on Saturday, October 7 on Magnolia Network at 1:00 p.m. ET with new episodes every Saturday. New episodes are available for streaming the same day on Max and discovery+.
This interview has been edited for clarity.