Newlyweds Katie and Stinson Lanoix may have celebrated their nuptials at the lavish Esperanza Resort in Cabo San Lucas. But back home in Baton Rouge, they’re packing the charm into a 989-square-foot cottage in Old Goodwood.

The high school sweethearts—she went to St. Joseph’s Academy; he went to Catholic High School—have been “perfecting” the home since Katie purchased it back in August 2023.

After graduating from LSU, Katie first bought a “cookie-cutter” house near campus. She lived in it with a roommate and left its spaces largely untouched. But scooping up and renovating a decades-old charmer was always part of her vision.

“I’m borderline obsessed with cottages and cute houses,” says Katie, who works in data analysis and holds a real estate license. “But whenever I bought my other house, it was in the right price range, and I knew I wanted to rent [it out] eventually, so I didn’t really touch it … Once I got my hands on this house, I just did it all.”

First up was the kitchen. The night of the closing, Katie recruited Stinson, her dad and a close friend to rip out the home’s bare-bones cabinetry. Soon they discovered the kitchen’s original shiplap buried behind the walls, so the sheetrock had to come down too.

Over the next few months, Katie worked with contractors to replace the dark granite countertops with white quartz and reconfigure the space to include a peninsula island, which the couple uses often when hosting friends for homemade gumbo and Sunday dinners. That original shiplap was painted white to create a delightful farmhouse feel, while floating shelves were anchored on top to show off a curated display of blue and white China, sourced from Katie’s grandmother’s collection.

A pop of lime green paint cues the couple’s fun, youthful side in the connecting mud room, outfitted with a small cocktail bar, which Katie keeps stocked with cute glassware for guests to grab on their way outside.

“It’s kind of always an open-door policy at my house,” Katie says. “Living in 900 square feet has not stopped anyone from coming over.”

With the central space of the home completed, Katie and Stinson tackled smaller projects over the course of the next three years. They painted the formal living room a moody grey that Katie concocted herself—a mixture of Benjamin Moore’s “Ashley Gray” and “Pashmina” at half strength. They sourced furniture from estate sales and Facebook Marketplace, found bargain artwork and “shopped” Katie’s grandmother’s collection some more. They added crown molding, painted more rooms, refreshed the single bathroom and swapped out Roman shades. Stinson even gifted Katie recessed lighting for her 27th birthday. “I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re old now,’” Katie recalls.

Following their wedding in July 2025, Katie and Stinson took on their next major home project: the she shed.

Originally intended to be a man cave, yet still one of Stinson’s favorite spaces today, the former storage shed was transformed last year into a greenhouse-style gathering place.

Stinson, who works in the lending side of real estate, took the lead on this project, painting the previously dingy space a crisp white, taking down a portion of an exterior wall and adding a sliding door that opens to the large yard. The couple poured a new concrete slab and added pea gravel outside to make the area more livable. The original cabinets and granite from the kitchen were repurposed here to create storage and a second bar, and mounted TVs and a fire pit outside make it an ideal spot for fall football and spring baseball watch parties, crawfish boils and more.

In the last year, following the couple’s wedding, Katie says something in the home has changed. Though Stinson has always been a large part of the property, helping with home renovations from day one, Katie admits there’s simply a different feeling now. “I don’t know what to put my finger on. I guess it’s ours and we are a team now … This is our house,” she says.

And though she acknowledges that the two-bed-one-bath layout gets tight and that one day she imagines they will move into a larger abode, she’s content with her cottage and is happy to “be faithful in the little.”

“I remind myself of it all the time because I complain that we don’t have room for things, but we have so much to be thankful for,” she says. “Take care of what you already have, and more will always follow.”

There’s nothing wrong with living in a smaller home, she adds. Plus, she has yet to find a listing with a she shed.