Remodel Heaven / Hell.

I have neglected this blog for too long.  Not that anyone reads this thing, but I apologize.  To myself.  I have been busy.  And it's the good kind because I get paid.  I am currently working on 3 remodels and it's great. I love working with families and navigating through the different personality dynamics between husbands and wives.  It's like design psychology.  It's my favorite thing to source materials and pick surfaces and finishes.  Some designers hate driving around doing the background research on materials.  I personally love it.  I have wood flooring, cabinet finishes, lighting and tile samples in boxes in the back of my car.  I have talked to about 50 reps from various manufacturers and been in more showrooms in one month than I have in all the years I have been doing this gig.  I am at what feels like constant and daily design meetings (face-to-face, via text, e-mail and Skype) and find myself making revisions to plans at midnight.  I really get so much more done when I'm busy.  It's heaven.  That is, until I lay in bed at night and think about the condition of my own house.  Then it's like hell.

Why can't I work on my house?  Why can't I have new tiles in my bathroom, shiny new SS appliances and new engineered quartz countertops in my kitchen?  Where are my custom built-in cabinets and what's my total construction budget?

As a designer, it's easy to go around spending other people's hard earned money and convincing them to choose x instead of y because of it's superior eco-friendly qualities.  It's not so easy when you see how quickly everything adds up if one were to make those exact same design decisions for themselves.  Four nicely spaced skylights goes down to two without the remote control shade option in a blink of an eye.

I revisited the plans for our house last night for the first time in months.  I rolled them out, closed my eyes and had a good laugh.  What plagues my current situation is the taste that I have acquired ($$$dream$$$ vs. $reality) through the years of specifying phenomenal products and not having the money to afford them myself.  The husband and I have been living in our "tear-down" for FOREVER now so one can just imagine the hours I have spent designing, redesigning and re-redesigning the minutia within every square inch of the "new house."  I can verbally walk you through the new construction and describe in nuanced detail every color and texture, every fixture and every plug location from the first floor up to the 3rd floor mezzanine.  I don't know much about landscape design, but for our house, I can recite the latin names of the various drought-tolerant plants that will live on our roof garden.  This hypothetical home has been marinating in my brain for so long that there are design decisions that I made 4 yeas ago that would now look practically archaic due to the constant flow of new materials and ideas that flood the market.  Hence the redesigns that occur over and over and over...  The newest tiles from way-back-when have now been replaced with the next generation of newest tiles.  They are hipper, shinier, more mod.  And even more out of my price range!  But I guess that's another great thing about the remodels I've been working on.  The more research I do, the more educated I become when it comes time to yet again update the designs for my own dream home...  I keep telling myself that someday, it'll become a reality.  I just hope it doesn't take so long that the structure has to change to resemble a space-age pod that floats...

So at the moment, I'm living vicariously through the three wonderful families that I'm designing for.  Between all three projects, I can safely say that I have fulfilled many of my current dreams for my own house.  The glass backsplash and Dacor stainless steel appliances from house A, the stately dark wood kitchen island and contrasting white countertops from house B and the banquet dining area and foyer layout from house C.

I'll keep the updates coming with pictures as the projects move into construction phase, but until then, more refining, structural calculations and construction documents...  Happy Remodeling.