Vibes

  My teenage son and I had an interesting talk the other day about “vibes.” He’s always been perceptive, but in this conversation he described the depth of his perceptions with astonishing eloquence. Most of us know when something just doesn’t “feel” right, but less frequently we listen to those instincts, dissect them and react appropriately.

When I was negotiating the purchase of the house I now live in, I brought my kids over to walk through it. It was important to me to give them a picture in their heads about the place they were likely to call home. Of course, I warned them that the current owners still inhabited the place, but I had also unreasonably assumed that my children would be able to see beyond the huge furniture, dark walls, cloaked windows, and Hagrid-like interiors to the Harry-like home, and understand the space minus the people who were living here. My son (at age 11) couldn’t. In fact, he couldn’t get out of this house fast enough and ended up in tears with deep unsettle. Nothing felt right to him about this house, and when I realized the perception he was getting, I didn’t blame him one bit. He was right; everything about the place in its current state threw horrible vibes.

My mother ended up having a phone conversation with him that almost immediately calmed him down. She later told me what she said to Jims: “I told him to trust you. I told him to wait until you get your hands on the place, because when you get done, it will feel like home.”

My incentive to do just that was enormous, of course. It's an absolute essential that my kids feel good in my home! From this experience, my whole perspective on design changed. It went from how can I make this look nice to how can I make this feel right. Interiors must throw good vibes.  No fakers allowed.

Number Five

I am going to renege. Sort of. Since August I have been retelling an old account. All of this blogging has been an effort of several intentional attempts in this order: (1) to help promote my business, (2) to keep you interested as a reader, (3) to keep me interested as a writer, (4) to document a tiny bit of history for my children’s posterity, and (5) to show the quiet evolution of something that I think we all can relate to if we take the time to try. However, in this process, Number Five surprised me and told me that it should be bumped up the list. In fact, Number Five screamed it at me.

I didn’t ever envision myself as or designer, or “sculptor” as one once described me, or an “artist” as another later would. But I am, and all this history that I’ve been sharing laid the groundwork for me to finally begin to own that. So now, with more than half this story told, and at a crucial turning point, Number Five is requiring me to finish this story first and share it with you and others later in a different format.

Therein lies the reneging. This blog will no longer be telling the story of how I became a designer, but it’s going to jump ahead and offer my personal—which naturally spills over to my professional—takes on the process. I will be writing in tandem for the next several weeks if not months, and I may, from time to time, share bits of the original story as it further unfurls for me in the privacy of my living room, but please bear with me as I try to keep this new tangent online interesting for all of us!

I love that you all are reading and I hope you wish me luck and stick with me as I try to fulfill Number Five’s demands while offering you different bits on this site.  Hopefully one will sustain the other!

With much thanks and love,

PS-Heim: Uzticība.

The Creation of Destruction

The rebuilding of the Girard house would become a very long process that would consume our lives for over a year. We optimistically figured that the fire’s damage had given us a clean slate to build something better. It seemed simple: cut out the charred bits and replace them with something new and fresh.

I was at the Girard house every day overseeing this process (and learning a whole lot about construction) when it occurred to me that I couldn’t prevent the smoke from seeping back inside. And we all know, where there is smoke, there is fire, and damage could easily be re-done. It was a scary feeling to realize "new and fresh" wasn’t good enough. It was becoming clear that not only the charred bits needed replacing, but the whole thing needed to become fire resistant. The destruction wasn’t over. Even though walls were being rebuilt and tall trusses were being lifted high, nothing was guaranteed against going up in smoke again, and I didn't like the odds.  There seemed to be a festering dichotomy at work.

Someone, I wish I could remember who, recently pointed out to me the theory that “At any given time we are contributing to either the cycle of creation or destruction in our lives. Both are necessary, but just know which one you are contributing to.” Is it possible to contribute to both?