Shop(ping) Talk

Some people love to shop. Some people hate to shop. Because building a house involves a LOT of shopping, no matter which category you are in, you’d better have a strategy for getting all that shopping done.

If you love to shop, you run the risk of overwhelming yourself with the choices available. You’ll spend unbelievable amounts of time deliberating over each of the thousands of decisions that go into building and furnishing a house. Believe me, I know, because this is my shopping style!

If you hate to shop, you have other pitfalls to avoid. In your desire to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible, you run the risk of choosing items one-by-one without thought to how they work together as a whole. Or you choose too quickly and without enough information. This leads to regrets down the road when you find a better product or a better price elsewhere.

Building a house is a marathon, not a sprint. You’ve got to have a strategy for making it across the finish line with enough energy left to enjoy this creation of yours.

I Love Framing!

Just as I was starting to become disillusioned and afraid this house would NEVER get built, along came the framers! If you ever want to feel like you are making progress in this world, get something framed up. In a matter of days—sometimes even hours—a whole building materializes in front of your eyes!

Starting Blue and Getting Bluer

From the photo here, I bet you think I’m going to talk about cost overruns. Well, I COULD, but I’m not. Not in this post anyway. No, I’m talking about a blue of another hue…

I’m getting the sense that the color blue is really making a comeback. I haven’t been this excited about blue—in all its permutations—since I was a kid getting to pick out my own paint color for my room (a lovely Alice blue by the way). Suddenly I’m obsessed with blue—soft and ethereal Nordic blue, deep and smoky blue-black, funky turquoise, and a lovely medium greyish blue referred to as “Titian blue” in a recent House Beautiful article.