Mara Soldinger/E! NewsIf you need advice, Molly Sims has it in droves.
Her fans turn to her for everything. She has 219,000 Instagram followers who look to her for sartorial inspiration. She wrote an entire book about her beauty, fashion and wellness secrets. Her famous friends like Jennifer Garner and Kate Hudson and Rachel Zoe are constantly hitting her up for inspiration and leaning on her to help promote their brands.
Sims' role as a sort of a lifestyle sage began years ago with Everyday Chic, and now she's back as a second-time author to dispel her wisdom. This time around she's tackling the home realm in Everyday Chic, which covers entertaining, organizing and all things Mom. As the lifestyle guru tells E! News, she created the book after a realization that she was constantly being hit up for all that aforementioned life advice.
"I realized I was doing this book without actually documenting it," she says. "Whether I was throwing a kid's birthday party or whatever, when people came over they would ask me about everything I was doing. Like, I have these stupid silver buckets that I throw everything in, and everyone was asking me about them."
As it turns out, creating a self-help book for busy mothers (and all women, really) was very much the same as creating a self-help book for people looking for beauty advice: You write what you know.
"My home is my heartbeat, so I took what I did with the first book," she explains. "And then I brought it into my home, with style and grace and just trying to live the fullest life possible."
The biggest question Sims gets is always where do I start? Her fans and friends alike often feel overwhelmed at the idea of curating a super-chic universe from scratch. She recommends doing one simple thing: Organization. If you organize it, they will come. Sims waxes poetic on the magic of purging—asking "Do I really need this?"—your own items and donating children's toys and clothes as soon as they stop using them (she offers up the charity Baby2Baby as a great place to donate), and getting the most-used spaces in your home in tip-top shape. And she means homes of all sizes.
"It doesn't even matter if you don't have a pantry, for example, you can have one line of shelves and one door," says Sims. "You can use stickers and Sharpies in your refrigerator, cut up your fruit instead of throwing all the cartons in there. Keep it clean, keep it minimal and that will help you with your mind."
Once you have the organization down, the next step is decorating. As a mother of three children under the age of five, Sims can't stress the importance of pouring yourself into your home enough: You're going to be there a heck of a lot more than you were pre-children. And it's advice that she was given before she became a mom.
"When I first started getting a little bit of money some friends of mine who were older models told me, don't spend it all on clothes," she laughs. "They said, put it where you can't get it, which is a mortgage."
Sims recalls feeling astounded at the idea of being able to afford to buy a house, but once she did it opened up a whole new world of inspiration for her.
"Then I started getting a little more money and I kind of got the design bug," she says. "I love design—I never met a couch I didn't like."
Sims believes that for families of any size, the first place you should start decorating is the kitchen because it's where everyone ends up naturally. Get everything in order there, and then move on to sprucing up the living or family room (wherever you keep your TV). And she has a very unexpected design tip.
"My home now, even though it is really nice and I have some amazing pieces, it is all done with outdoor fabric on the inside furniture," she dishes. "Because there will be a smoothie or a bottle or dirty feet somewhere at all times. No one knows it's outside fabric, but I have to say it is definitely one of my secrets."
That also allows her to be considerably more chill during the many parties she throws, be it birthdays or school get-togethers or events of the more grown-up variety. She warns would-be entertainers to "never skimp on the food and drinks" and also that learning the art of a cheese plate will never fail.
"Just Friday night I had a big cheese plate and then I had the nuts and I did cookies that had flowers in them," she says of a recent soirée. The devil is in the details, it really is. We are an Instagram world right now."
This is all just as impressive as it sounds, but Sims also wants her fans to know that she wasn't always this savvy. Her family grew exponentially (it tripled, in fact) in just a matter of years, and before she started her motherhood journey she was just as green in the home department as anybody: She's not afraid to cop to keeping sweaters in her oven and having a fridge full of nothing but wine. She had to slowly acclimate to no longer being on her own, doing whatever she pleased, and she says her feeling of having it all together fell into place suddenly.
"It happened a couple of years ago when I had the two kids," Sims says. "I had people come over last minute and I realized I wasn't worried. I was like, okay, I got this. I got the kids, I got the pizza, I got the skewers, I have the instant dough that bakes cookies, I felt like I had it."
And if that confidence ever wavers she turns to her iron-clad circle of friends. Molly's mom group notoriously includes some famous faces, the aforementioned Jen Garner and Kate Hudson among women like Gwyneth Paltrow and Chrissy Teigen and Jessica Alba, as well as "non-industry" friends—all of whom make it possible for her to live this chic lifestyle.
"I will say my girlfriends are my village," she stresses. "Some are in the public eye and some are not but it doesn't matter. It's real conversations, it's real feeling, it's real advice."
Sims says that she crowd-sources all kinds of things from her mom squad, like what to make for her kid's lunches when she's out of ideas, or how to dress them for the weather at the pumpkin patch. Currently she's in the midst of trying to find a good school and she pointed out the great advice she's received.
Sims has found that her self-professed village has helped so much to make this second chapter in her life, after the craziness of acting and modeling, feel so secure that she's fine to never return to her former industry.
"I just can't do it right now," she says of her past career. "Me being on set in, say, New Mexico or Austin, I just don't want to be stuck in a trailer, waiting. Your whole life is waiting as an actor."
And waiting is something she's done enough of for now.
"I miss acting so much, but I waited so long to have this life and be involved with my kids," says Sims. "And I wouldn't trade that for anything."