Senior Carlee Cumming loves organization. She can be found re-arranging a multitude of spaces at any given moment.
“This is so weird, but I love organizing my friends’ rooms or cleaning their rooms,” Carlee said. “And I organize[senior] Trystan [Tilton’s] car. I love cleaning his car because all of my stuff is very neat. Don’t get me wrong, it’s ugly sometimes, but I love how everything has a place.”
Carlee does not limit her expertise in organization to her friends. She decorates her room–and usually the rest of her house—for the holidays as well. She also helps her mom and sister clean and furnish their living space.
“I feel like I helped my mom a lot and my sister with our house,” Carlee said. “I’ll say to my sister, ‘What is happening in here?’ And so I definitely helped them a lot.”
Carlee has always loved organizing, which is why she is found reorganizing her room and her friends’ cars all the time. Carlee believes every knick-knack has a home, and she has an eye for finding the perfect spots for her furniture and knick-knack finds. She takes to thrift stores and Pinterest for inspiration. She has found things such as vanities and personalized birthday gifts this way.
“Yeah, [I love finding people personal knick-knacks],” Carlee said. “And [for] some people, it’s like, ‘Oh, I can’t get them those because they will never use that,’ but I try to find [cool decorations]. I feel like [gift-giving] is definitely my love language. I give gifts all the time; I’ll give my friends little random gifts like, ‘Here’s cookies,’ or, ‘here’s this.’ And so finding little vintage-y stuff or just random stuff that you don’t have every day is really cool.”
Carlee’s eye for decorating is helping her not only with her love language of gift giving but also in her current class, architecture rendering and design. She decided to take this class as a way to help her in her future as an interior designer. She is planning on attending the University of Mississippi and rooming with senior Elsa Kehoe. She also has an internship already set up since her grandma’s friend owns a decorating company in Mississippi.
I feel like it is definitely my love language. I am giving gifts all the time; I’ll give my friends little random gifts like, ‘Here’s cookies or here’s this.’
Her grandma and her grandma’s friend are not the only influences in her decision to get into interior design. Carlee loves to try out other styles of design that are not similar to her own and help others. Interior design allows her to do both.
“I really like working with people and helping other people.” Carlee said. “And I think I’m a very organized person; that’s something else [I could do in the future]. I can have my own organizing show and be able to help people to [decorate their homes], but put it into their aesthetic and their style. I think it would be really cool, [especially because] I have my own personal [aesthetic] that I like. I like it so much, and I’m like, ‘I love [decoration], but I’d never put it in my house [but I could put it into someone elses].’”
Carlee doesn’t have her whole future planned out, but she knows she wants to do something with interior design—eventually living somewhere warm and always helping people. For her, that’s enough.
“I feel like I’ve always just been very like, ‘[Let me] help decorate this for Christmas,’ or, ‘let me help make this perfect,’” Carlee said. “I’ve always been very hands-on with everything and fixed it to how I [and others] like it.”
