Builder's Remorse

Never never ever build a house from scratch.  You will second-guess all your decisions. You will bore and/or alienate your friends by talking about it.  You will resent writing the humongous checks to contractors and suppliers.  You will fret over tiny nuances of color and texture.  You will feel guilty every time you incur an expense unrelated to the new house.   You and your spouse will bicker. And you will frequently have bad dreams. 

One thing will help bolster your spirits during this phase--the anticipation of actually retreating to the place when it's complete, and sharing that pleasure with friends and family. 

I haven't been back to the site since mid September, but I hear its really progressing. My North Carolina friend Karen recently visited the house with her daughter and grandson, and took a few photos. (Thanks!) The exterior is all done:  the siding is hung and painted, the small covered front and back porches are built, the roof shingles, guttering and garage door are on, and all the dirt moving, rock retaining walls, and hyrdo-seeding are finished.  It's buttoned up tight for the winter, and all the interior work can move forward since we have water, heat and electricity inside.

Despite these achievements, it's not all been rosy.  As I alluded to earlier, there are frustrations. For example, back in July, my friends and I spent a good deal of time choosing most of the coordinating materials for the interior--like carpet, tile, hardwoods, counter-tops, vinyl and such.  We searched, scrutinized and visualized to be sure that all products matched or blended with one another.  But at some point over the next months, something minor changed--the interior paint color perhaps.  And then began the domino effect.  Different paint meant that the entryway tile had to be modified--and since this is the same as the bathroom floor tile-- the shower tile also had to change.  Then the bathroom counter-top wasn't quite right. Concurrently I had to select the fireplace stone, and here we went around again.  This required more tweaking of the entry tile, as well as the kitchen counter-tops, since all can be seen at once in the open floor-plan.  Now some suppliers are stingier with their samples than others, and we did much of this without a sample of the cabinet color, which of course impacts the wall colors, which in turn impacts the flooring and counter choices. One supplier waited a month, only to send me duplicate samples of four carpet colors, and one sample of the fifth color by separate post.  The sample tiles never arrived.  It was impossible to gather samples of all the things we needed at the same time since we were working with more than five vendors and across states.   I took photos, cleverly thinking that I could use those to coordinate colors. Sadly, the color rendering on the computer (and on the printed pictures) was awful.  Add to this the frustration of phone tag and a looming deadline. By now you are feeling the pain, I'm sure.  Last week, as the deadline approached, I embarked on a wild goose chase to round up samples here in Raleigh in a last ditch effort to come up with an appealing and affordable visual palette.  I took a half day of vacation one rainy afternoon and went to the following Triangle businesses:  Pro-Source, Daltile, Kitchen Gallery, Home Depot, and Environmental StoneWorks. Even then, I met with some dead ends.  It was WAYYYYY more brain damage than it was worth, considering children are starving in Africa and cholera threatens the Haitians.  But it's done.  It better be good.  It will certainly be a "chef's surprise" to see it all pulled together in the house.  My true friends will assure me that it looks great, my spouse will keep his comments to himself, and all the others--well--just don't go there. Literally.