Nate's Grand Finale

Nate says he's learned a few tricks since his first makeover. "We had nowhere to put everything we took out and nowhere to put any of the furniture that arrived," he says. "We didn't order a Dumpster. ... I'm thinking, 'This is the first time I'm going to go on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and the headline is going to be "Oprah's Bad Trash."' We'd never done it before. We didn't know the mechanics!"

The other challenge when he first started was time. "My design projects take years," he says. "So to see all of the furniture which I had preselected, obviously, arrive and I have a four-hour window. Sometimes stuff doesn't work out. You've bought a table or two and you think, 'That's not really what I hoped it would be.' I didn't have a choice. So from that day forward, I always ordered a little bit more than I needed to."

Nate's done a few small-space makeovers since that first one and says, above all, there are two rules to decorate by. First, furniture must be multifunctional. "You can't just have something in the house because you like it. You have to have double duty, triple duty even, if you can."

Also, use regular-scale furniture. "Using small-scale pieces in small spaces reminds us that everything's small," Nate says. "[A large sofa or other furniture] gives you more places to be. It's much more gracious than these tiny things that are designed for small spaces."