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Selected work

Six homes, and the decision that unlocked each one

Every project here started the same way: a folder of saved images, two people disagreeing politely, and a choice nobody could bring themselves to make. What changed was almost never the taste. It was the order things got decided in.

Six of 240+ projects · 2024 and 2025 · Portland metro, plus remote work in 38 states

These are a fair sample rather than a highlight reel. Projects are listed by what the client actually bought from bumfuzzledjane.com rather than by how photogenic the room turned out, so a nine-day rental fix sits alongside an eighteen-month renovation. The service name on each card links through to what that engagement includes.

Cream and oak living room with a gallery wall and linen sofa in a restored 1924 Portland bungalow. 2025
Whole-Home Concept

Alberta Street Bungalow

Portland, OR

A 1924 bungalow with nine wall colors and no plan. We reduced it to three, opened the rear wall and phased the work across eighteen months.

The brief was a whole-house repaint. Ten minutes into the first call it was clear a repaint would lock in a kitchen that wanted to move three feet, so the structural work went first and the paint waited until month eleven. Opening the rear wall came out of the phasing plan rather than a wish list, and it stayed the only load-bearing change in the whole program.

Phasing Four stages, 18 months

Loft living room with tan leather seating, plants and a gallery wall beneath tall industrial windows. 2025
Room Design Plan

Pearl District Loft

Portland, OR

Fourteen-foot ceilings and nowhere comfortable to sit. Tan leather, a wool rug big enough to hold the seating, and a library wall that fixed the echo.

Loft acoustics are a design problem wearing a furniture problem’s clothes. The owners had already bought seating that was right in every way except scale, so the plan kept it and worked around it. A library wall, a wool rug sized to hold all four seats and heavy linen at the windows brought the reverb down far enough to hold a conversation across the room.

Kept from before Both sofas

Modern kitchen and living space with warm walnut paneling and a pale sectional sofa. 2024
Renovation Advisory

Sellwood Family Kitchen

Sellwood, OR

Three bids, $41,000 apart. We normalized the scope, caught two missing line items, and the family built the better kitchen for less than the middle quote.

They arrived with the cheapest bid already half-signed. Normalizing the scope showed it carried no electrical, no countertop, and a two-week allowance for cabinets that take nine. We checked the working aisle against NKBA clearance guidance before anyone ordered, because a bad aisle is a mistake you walk through twice a day for twenty years.

Bid spread resolved $41,000

Moody primary bedroom with dark walls, a brass chandelier and a tufted upholstered bed. 2024
Room Design Plan

Laurelhurst Primary Suite

Laurelhurst, OR

The last room in the house to get attention, as usual. Deep clay walls, brass fittings, and a bed you can actually see from the door.

The last room in the house to get attention had been the household storage unit for six years, and its budget had been quietly raided four times. One constraint held the whole plan together: nothing gets bought until the bed wall is resolved. Dark walls in a north-facing room need light at three heights, so the pendant, two swing-arm sconces and a floor lamp were specified before a single textile.

Revision rounds used One of two

Bohemian rental living room with layered textiles, macrame wall hanging and warm timber furniture. 2024
Design Direction Call

Mississippi Avenue Rental

Portland, OR

Everything had to be reversible and under $3,000. Layered textiles, plug-in lighting, and a rug that did the work the floor could not.

The landlord’s list of things that could not change ran to a full page: no paint, no fixtures, nothing screwed in above the picture rail. That constraint did most of the design work for us. Everything specified either plugs in, leans, or leaves with the tenant at the end of the lease, and the single largest line was the rug.

Total spend Under $3,000

Warm sitting room with a vintage patterned rug, woven wall baskets and mid-century seating. 2025
Design Direction Call

Hawthorne Reading Room

Portland, OR

A spare room that had been a gym, an office and a nursery. One ninety-minute call, one vintage rug, and it finally became the room they use every evening.

One ninety-minute call, no plan document and no drawings. The owners assumed they needed built-in joinery. What they needed was to stop asking one room to do three jobs at once. We named the single use, pulled the seating off the walls, and the joinery budget went into one very good vintage rug instead.

Call to finished room Nine days

Behind the pictures

What a bumfuzzledjane.com project actually involves

Photographs flatter everybody. Here is the unglamorous part: what happens between the first email and the room at the top of this page.

  1. 01

    You send the mess

    Photographs of every wall, a phone sketch with rough measurements, an honest budget, and the quote you do not understand. Nothing needs tidying first. A surprising amount of what we learn comes from the things people apologize for.

  2. 02

    We rank the risks

    Structural decisions get made first, because those are the expensive ones to undo. Paint is cheap and comes late. On anything built before 1978 we also ask whether your contractor holds EPA Lead-Safe certification, which matters here: most of Portland was built long before it.

  3. 03

    The decisions get written down

    A palette with real manufacturer codes, a schedule with prices and live links, a drawing where the furniture actually fits, and an order of operations. Whatever depth you bought, it ends as something you can hand to a contractor or work through yourself on a Saturday.

  4. 04

    You build it at your own pace

    Nobody stands behind you with a schedule. The Alberta Street bungalow took eighteen months and four phases. The Hawthorne reading room took nine days and one rug. Both of those count as finished projects here.

None of the six projects above earned us a supplier commission, a trade discount or a markup on anything bought, because bumfuzzledjane.com does not take them. What you are looking at is what each homeowner chose to spend, in the order we suggested spending it. Two of these projects cost $295 in consulting fees.

If you want the reasoning rather than the results, most of the method is written out in the journal, and the practice itself is described on the about page. If you have a room, a house or a set of bids that has stalled, the fastest route in is a Design Direction Call, and Jane answers her own email.

In their words

Two of the homeowners above

Marisa’s bungalow and Devon’s kitchen are both on this page. Neither was asked for a review; bumfuzzledjane.com runs no referral scheme and no incentive program.

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I had 480 saved images and no idea what any of them had in common. Jane found the thread in about twenty minutes and then told me which four things to buy. The rest I already owned.

Portrait of Marisa Ledbetter Marisa LedbetterHomeowner, Alberta Street Bungalow

The bid review paid for itself on the first page. Two of our three contractors had left out the electrical, which is exactly why one of them looked so cheap.

Portrait of Devon Arriaga Devon ArriagaHomeowner, Sellwood Family Kitchen

Begin here

Your house is not the hard part. Choosing is.

Send the room, the floor plan or the three bids that do not agree with each other. Jane reads every message herself and replies within one working day with an honest answer about whether we can help.

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