When couples first move in together, a common source of conflict can be a clash in decorating styles.
Emma Ganzarain decided to completely redecorate her boyfriend’s apartment while documenting the process on TikTok and navigating the criticism she’s been receiving along the way.
In one of her videos, she showed various photos of rooms in the apartment, including the living area and the kitchen. Ganzarain shows what the apartment looked like when just her boyfriend was living there, and then showed an after photo of her changes to the apartment.
For example, the original design in the living room had a lot of warm and dark colours like red, burgundy, brown, and navy. The lighting was more orange and it had a hardwood floor. After the redesign, everything in the room was either cream or beige and the light became bright and harshly white.
The exact same design changes were made to the apartment’s kitchen too. Originally, there were black granite-like countertops with a circular sink and even some artwork. The redesign changed the countertops and the cabinets to be an off-white colour, changed the sink to a traditional rectangle shape, and removed all of the artwork.
Since Ganzarain posted the TikTok, with the caption: “All men needs a woman in their life,” it has received over five million views. Many people took to the comments section to express how much they disliked the supposedly new and improved interior design choices.
“His soul is no longer in that space. Stop trying to fix the men in your life and learn to love them for who they are and the way they want to decorate,” one comment read.
Another agreed, writing: “Not me liking all the befores better because it’s not just sad beige.”
However, the TikToker decided to show the critics that she wouldn’t let the comments bother her through a combination of responding to the comments and making parody follow-up videos to respond to them.
“I have to join the others… personally the before looked really good.. it still looks good but completely different style..the other person is erased,” one comment wrote. Ganzarain responded to this one explaining that her boyfriend is a “broke student” and most of his furniture was gifted.
“Well I just meant that in the first video it’s just random gifted furniture and not a style, but now we actually invested in nice quality furniture and I think it looks much better,” she replied.
When another person commented about how harsh the white light was and how the yellow light would make the apartment look more cosy, the TikToker made an entire video of the apartment complete with lit candles and the lights dimmed to show that the apartment could still look cosy.
“Well he is allowed to have his Arsenal coffee mug in the living room sometimes,” she responded to another comment that pointed out how little of her boyfriend’s personality is present within her redesign.
“Chillin while people are raging about me liking beige and decorating our home how we like it,” Ganzarain joked in the caption of another TikTok video.
