An interesting thing has been occurring for me over the last several months, especially related to building this house. Here’s an example, the fireplace wall originally started out the way it is now but over the course of a few months we worked through several scenarios, only to end up back where we started. Not out of exhaustion but because eliminating every other choice led us back to the original choice being right.
The problem with subjective choices is even if every choice had a 50/50 shot of being guessed right, half of all decisions would be wrong. Subjectivity exacerbates the problem because subjective decisions, especially ones being made by a man and a woman, have an infinite amount of options. If it’s someone other than Lisa AND me making the decisions, the poor SOB who makes the call is likely to be wrong.
Wouldn’t life be easier if your gut was right every time? You could always just go with your gut. Sadly, at least for me, my gut is only right most of the time. It’s the few times my gut is wrong that makes every decision a laborious process. While my gut is is most often right, when its wrong it’s embarrassingly wrong. So, I am relegated to a life of second guessing.
We went to the house early today. We met with our finish carpenter (not Finnish, he’s a local fella) and our builder’s Project Manager. We wanted to make sure if there are any judgement calls that we make them or work through them rather than just let someone else make the decisions as they come up.
In the first few minutes of this meeting the builder and the finish carpenter made it seem like there were no “judgement calls” to be made.
Ha! We showed them. After about an hour we had gone through several key decisions. As luck would have it we spent the most time discussing the alignment of the kitchen island. For perspective, the island is pretty massive – 9 1/2′ long. Who would have thought we could try to align it to so many things? We tried aligning the sink (in the island) to the cook top. That didn’t align with the pendant lights. Should we move the pendant lights? What about distance from the island to the dinette table, we didn’t want that too tight. We used a laser measure and moved 4″ one way, two another… we moved things around about 5 times and ended up right back where we started. A job well done.
By the way, the image above is not showing a super “off kilter house”, nor is our new house a house boat rolling over 10 foot swells … it seems the photographer (Lisa) may have been sniffing glue. You should also know this was at about 8:15 AM. Who sniffs glue before 9?
