Keeping Calm

If you follow our blog, you know that I am a ‘want-it-now’ kind of girl. This room by room do it yourself remodel is not the ideal situation for someone like me. I like order and cleanliness and beauty. I want to see it in tidy rooms, freshly painted walls, well-maintained landscapes and shiny polished floors. I want modish furniture, lighting and cabinetry. I want consistency, not the hodge-podge of cottage Pottery-Barn-esque and hand-me-down pieces we are currently living with. I think that because I know my vision and see it clearly in my head, I struggle with anything falling short of it.

And while I may be impatient with this endeavor, I am also self-aware enough to know that this is a great learning and growth experience for me. I keep a quote on my computer at work that says, "Life is not about certainty. It is about living in the middle of complete uncertainty and doing so gracefully." And grace is what I am working on. Living through this with grace and gratitude. I do not often succeed. But I also try not to give up. Every day affords me the opportunity to try again and that is the beauty of going to sleep at night. As Scarlett says, "Tomorrow is another day". I know there is infinite wisdom in learning to live with uncertainty and that is my personal work at the moment. I hope that I will emerge from this (hopefully before my 50th birthday) wiser, more mature and with a settled and sensible view on life. Maybe. I will remember this message from SparklePower: Every Thing Is Going To Be Alright.

As I have been working on adjusting to a new and improved attitude, I realized I need to re-organize my thoughts and expectations. Again. Since having it all now isn’t a reality, I need to break it into bite-sized achievable projects, baby steps as discussed here. But even the baby steps haven’t really reduced my discomfort with the overwhelming amount of work that we have before us. Maybe I need fetal steps. Even babier baby steps.

It all became clear to me when recently reading one of my favorite blogs, Young House Love. In previous blogs of theirs I have read that they approach things in phases. This got me thinking. Maybe baby step projects isn’t the right approach.  Maybe I need to look at the house in phases and give ourselves time to complete each phase before moving on to the next.

For example, the main bathroom project we have been working on. Phase one would have been moving everything in and making it functional for the family. Wait. Scratch that. Make that phase zero. (Something more akin to ground zero than I like to admit.) Phase one would have been minor modifications to make it more attractive and more ‘ours’ than it was when we moved in. In this case, painting, new fixtures, towels and shower curtain. Phase one would also be some kind of a solution for the floor, so we are in the midst of phase one. Funny how the mind works, isn’t it? When framed that way, I feel good we have gone beyond one phase and are well into another. Success!

Phase zero is pretty much completed across the board in our new home, i.e. basically we have moved in and are living and functioning successfully with our new home. More success! And there are a variety of phase ones before us. Phase one will go room by room as well. With the bathroom in the midst of phase one and Maeve’s room phase one completed, we are beginning to think about the next phase one project. More wallpaper removal and painting? Master bathroom project of wallpaper removal, painting and floor? Kitchen painting of walls and cabinets? I think we will end up going with whatever catches our fancy.

And obviously for me, it matters not which way we go as long as we are headed there.

(To read more, visit our blogsite at www.midcenturymodernlove.com.)