Kendra Spohn on Home, Exhaustion & Becoming

Earlier Kendra was standing in a partially renovated Victorian home in Benton Harbor, Michigan. The dining room floor is missing. Outlets are exposed. There is, quite literally, a hole in the roof. And yet she is at TJ Maxx, holding a vase of flowers she has no business buying, because something in her insists they belong on a table that does not yet have a finished floor beneath it.

“I know the dining room floor was missing”, she told me. All the outlets needed to be done and there was a hole in the roof. “But it is really important for me to put these flowers on this table.”

That sentence is the whole story. Not because it is about flowers, but because it is about a woman who refused to wait for her life to look finished before she let it feel like home.

The Mayor's House was never just a renovation project. It was Kendra rebuilding herself, one nail and one impossible decision at a time.

The Girl Who Grew Up Around Blueprints

Long before Kendra ever signed a mortgage on a crumbling Victorian, she was a little girl trailing her architect father through construction sites that doubled as playgrounds. She remembers the smell of fresh wood the way some people remember a grandmother's kitchen. Her father built new homes rather than renovating old ones, and the people around her were realtors and builders, the kind of people who talk about square footage the way other families talk about weather. She did not choose this world. She was raised inside it.

So many of us assume our becoming starts the day we make a bold decision. Kendra's story is a reminder that sometimes becoming is a homecoming to pieces of yourself placed there long before you had the language to name them. She was not learning to love old houses and creative spaces. She was simply remembering it.

Buying the House That Changed Everything

By the time Kendra found the Mayor's House, she was not looking for an adventure. She was looking for the opposite. She was settled in a duplex two blocks from Lake Michigan in St. Joseph, living in the lower unit, renting out the upper, telling herself this was enough. A calm life. A simple one. Maybe some painting on the side, since that was the thing she did for herself.

Then she found it while helping someone else.

She was searching for clients who wanted something move-in ready in the hundred to hundred-thirty thousand dollar range, which, as she quickly realized, does not exist for a sprawling historic Victorian. But there it was on the market anyway, asking one hundred twenty thousand dollars, far too big and far too broken to make sense for anyone who simply wanted a quiet life by the lake.

I guess I have to get this property, she told herself. Not because the math worked. Because something in her recognized it before she fully understood why.

What followed was not a smooth path toward ownership. She had been licensed as a realtor for less than two years, which meant traditional banks would not touch her loan application. She had to go through a hard money lender and clear hoop after hoop, all while knowing that if her offer fell through, it would not just cost her a house. It would cost her reputation. She then spent thirty days terrified that withdrawing would make the listing look damaged, like something was wrong with it, like she could not be trusted to follow through.

“I know that I can make this thing make money”, she told herself, even when she had no proof yet that it would. She describes the feeling now in language that has become something like a personal theology: God was laying the tracks right in front of my train. She was not waiting for the rails to appear before she started moving. She got on, and the tracks kept showing up exactly far enough ahead to keep her from derailing.

That is not the language of someone who had it figured out. It is the language of someone who decided to move anyway.

Living Inside the Chaos

What Instagram never showed was the month Kendra could not walk through her own living room.

She closed on the house the day before Christmas Eve, and almost immediately moved in, determined to give her teenage son something that still felt like a home rather than an abandoned construction zone. The furnace failed. The windows were plexiglass, doing nothing to hold back a Michigan winter. Then the pipes burst, and the entire dining room floor had to be torn out, beams and all, after discovering the wood had been hollowed out by insects. This meant the dining room's contents migrated to the living room, resulting in weeks where there was nowhere in her own house to simply sit down.

She was bartending at night, selling real estate by day, raising a teenage son, managing two dogs and three cats, dating, and tearing apart a house around all of it.” If you had interviewed me a year and a half ago”, she told me, laughing at the memory now, “you would have said no one should ever be an entrepreneur. She looked like she was about to lose her mind.”

And still, she kept buying candles. Still, she kept finding a picture for the wall, a vase for the table, a small intentional detail with no functional purpose other than reminding her, and anyone who walked through her door, that this was still a place where someone cared. Those things are what I need to get through the mess, she said. Not decoration for its own sake. Survival dressed up as beauty.

Kendra was not waiting for her life to stabilize before she let it become beautiful. She built warmth into the wreckage, because she understood something many of us forget in our own unfinished seasons: home is not the absence of chaos. It is the decision to plant something tender in the middle of it anyway.

The Woman She Became in the Process

Somewhere in the middle of all that disorder, Kendra started showing up at Lowe's covered in paint, hair unwashed, makeup nonexistent, teeth sometimes not even brushed. Not because she stopped caring about herself, but because she ran out of room to care about the version of herself that needed to look finished in order to feel worthy of being seen.

“I started developing relationships”, she said, “not based on me feeling good about myself and my appearance, but just like what I'm doing that day”. The Lowe's employees learned her name. They asked what she was working on. She built friendship on the foundation of her actual life rather than her curated one, and something in her loosened because of it.

“I gained a lot of self confidence in a different way”, she told me. Not the confidence of looking put together. The confidence of discovering she could do hard things even while looking like she had been wrestling a house, because she had been.

There was a moment at a women’s conference that anchors this entire transformation. Kendra originally wasn’t going to go. Rest did not come naturally to her, not when there was a house falling apart and a business to build and a son to raise. But she made the time and someone in the event said something that cracked something open in her: you are worthy even if you are not doing anything.

“That sounded ridiculous to me”, she admitted. “And I needed to hear it.”

Because Kendra, like so many women carrying both ambition and exhaustion, had quietly built her worth on a foundation of constant motion. Productivity had become so tangled with identity that stillness felt like failure. The renovation stripped away her need to appear polished. What it left behind was something sturdier. Not a woman who finally looked like she had it together, but a woman who no longer needed to.

When Home Changes Meaning

For most of Kendra's adult life, home has been wherever her son was. That is shifting now. He is nineteen, working, gone three weeks out of every four, and Kendra finds herself asking a question she has never had to sit with before: what is home to me, now that it is not defined by him?

She does not have a tidy answer yet. What she has instead is the Mayor's House itself, transforming from a structure she built around her own family into a space designed to hold other families' moments of rest. She is no longer only building a home for herself and her son.

She is building one that opens its door to strangers and lets them borrow that same feeling, even temporarily, even just for a weekend.

That is its own kind of becoming. Motherhood loosening its grip just enough to let identity expand into something new. Purpose shifting from protecting one family to welcoming many.

One Track at a Time

Kendra's advice for anyone whose dream is taking longer than expected is not complicated. Keep going. One step at a time. You do not have to know all the steps. Just get on the train, even when you cannot see the next several miles of track. Trust that it will appear because you started moving, not because you waited until the path was fully visible.

Her story is not a tidy one about a woman who had a vision and executed it flawlessly. It is messier and far more honest than that. It is the story of a woman who bought a crumbling house she could not really afford, lived through a winter with no functioning heat, lost her appearance-based confidence and found something more durable in its place, and kept lighting candles in rooms that were nowhere near finished.

Kendra did not figure it all out before she moved. She discovered that courage often looks exactly like that, flowers on a table with no floor beneath it, trusting that the next length of track will be there the moment her train needs it.

Kendra Spohn is a realtor, entrepreneur, and owner of The Mayor’s House Bed & Breakfast in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Blending her love of design, hospitality, and historic homes, Kendra has spent the last several years restoring a Victorian property while simultaneously building a new chapter of life for herself and her family. Through real estate, entrepreneurship, and creating spaces that feel warm and welcoming, she is passionate about helping people feel at home — both physically and emotionally. Connect with Kendra and follow the journey of The Mayor’s House on Instagram