I stopped blogging last summer because I found myself feeling very constrained in writing about the things that were on my mind, for fear of being "found out." I tried when I first started doing this to "disguise" myself, but I had a hard time keeping it up, and anyone who knows me and read this blog would know this is "me" very quickly. This started to become a problem for me. The biggest things going on in my life, that I wanted to muse about, were related to my job, my firm, and my career, and I just didn't feel comfortable blogging about them. Blogging about your job is always fraught with peril.
You don't necessarily want your boss to read about how much you hate your job, or your boss, or how much you are goofing off. Dooce, a mommy blogger, famously lost her job because of things she wrote on her blog. And airing internal politics is especially dangerous. There were very big things afoot careerwise in the fall last year, much of which was truly confidential, and it would have been wrong, even a breach of my fiduciarly duties, to write about it on a public forum. Even trying to leave out the names to protect the innocent didn't feel safe. So last summer and fall I wrote many posts about my life, and my career, and how I felt about it all, but I could never seem to hit "publish," so I just stopped, kept those as my private diary. And because I couldn't write about the things that were occupying my mind most of the day, I just stopped writing.
The culmination of all the turmoil is that I have a new job, at a new firm that is about 10 times the size of my old firm. I came to this new firm with lots of people from my old firm. It was a painful break for many of us. I'm commuting to NY on a daily basis now. It is different, in some ways that are good and some ways that are bad, and I think I'll leave it at that.
What brings me back now is my latest obsession -- my kitchen. And my porch. And my driveway, and my basement, and my vesitbule, and my stairs. And light fixtures. Paint colors. Porch roof. All of it. My description of this blog includes restoring my Victorian house, but I haven't written about it much. But the house is such a force in my life that it deserves commentary. In fact, it is occupying so much of my energy and emotion right now think I need to write about it. No one reads this anyway, so it is really like talking to myself, and I don't have to feel so stupid for obsessing so much. It is like going to therapy. Therapy is so great because it is the one place you don't have to feel bad about spending all your time talking about yourself.
I was inspired to do this by a blog written by Susan Serra, a very talented kitchen designer, www.thekitchendesigner.org (oh how I wish I had found her blog sooner). She recently had a couple of posts about the Dream House Diaries, a "blog" by a couple building their supposed "dream house" in a town in Florida. One could hardly call it a blog, there was no give and take, it was incredibly impersonal, etc. But it had a pretty big following, lots of comments, mostly by people who seemed to hate what this couple was doing with their house. When I first read it, I thought that people were just so nasty, and I found it almost offensive, but after reading more, I realized that these folks were shouting into the wind, which I think made it easier for them to be brutally honest. There were no retorts from the bloggers, no protests of hurt feelings, so people just fired away. Pictures of the end result of this house prove that the negative comments were mostly warranted. It is an okay house. But it has so many mistakes, blatant, ugly, unfixable mistakes. Anyway, reading this "blog," made me wish that I had been blogging the process of renovating our house, designing the kitchen, etc. I know that I could not bear all the criticism the Dream House Diaries couple got, but I've never had more than a handful of commenters, and those mostly from mommy bloggers, so there' s not much danger of that happening anyway.
We're actually pretty far along in our renovation now. We've had our plumbing, building and electrical inspections (and passed, thank goodness!). A new subfloor has been installed. Insulation is going in later this week. Windows are being installed today. Pretty exciting, the first time something new and pretty will actually go in.
I think I'll go back and talk about how we got here, a bit at a time. It may help someone, if anyone ever reads this. And it will definitely help me. I've been going slightly insane, worrying about how it will all turn out, having second thoughts about so many decisions, feeling paralyzed about other decisions.
As I said on another blog, this has been such a long process, it feels like I am about to give birth, and I'm so worried that my baby won't be healthy, that there will be something wrong. I think I also felt this way before my wedding. There was so much planning, so much money spent, so many details. I tried not to think of it as "THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY OF MY LIFE" but it was the biggest party I had ever thrown, and I was a wreck. I didn't need everything to be perfect, but I didn't want to have any regrets.
Because of my increasing insanity, we asked our kitchen designer to meet with us this weekend. I had been feeling very worried about how things were going to turn out, and felt that the process was getting away from us, so we met with him on Sunday morning, to go over all the details of the design again, the timetable for completion, etc. I had mis-remembered some things, and in going over all the details, there were some things I wished we'd done differently, but it is too late now, so I won't dwell.
Overall, I feel much better now than I did a week or so ago, when I left a bit of a vent on Susan Serra's blog about my kitchen and where it was headed. Our KD brought two of our actual cabinet doors with him, and they looked really nice, to my relief. Our main kitchen cabinet color is a creamy white with a charcoal glaze, and our island and butler's pantry are natural cherry. The doors looked beautiful, especially the cherry doors, which made me happy. We made some choices based on cost, and I was beginning to worry that, with all the money we are spending, our cabinets would look cheap, but they really looked good. Our designer also brought one of our actual floor tiles, which also looked very nice, if browner than I remembered. We are doing a terra cotta floor, which has me a bit worried in terms of maintenance and durability, but I love the look. The sample we saw in the store had a shiny glaze, and we asked for a more satin glaze, and it looked great.
I have to actually do some work, so I can't go back in time now. But maybe later tonight, I will try and go back and start from the beginning.
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, there was a very old house, with a very small and unattractive kitchen, and a family who dreamed of something better. . . .
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