An Update on Our New House—I’m Trusting the Process

Foundation walls, Christmas Day 2018

Our new home is still not much more than a hole in the ground. The foundation walls were poured in mid-December. By Christmas, some backfilling around the walls had been done. As of January 8, the garage hole had been filled in. (Did you know that garage floors can be made self-supporting, so it doesn’t matter how compact the fill is?) And by last Friday, January 18, the concrete floor for the basement and garage had been poured.

But it still doesn’t look like much, particularly on cloudy, gray days—the kind of days that have made much of Kansas City’s winter this year.

Basement floor, January 18, 2019

Obviously, since the foundation is done, we have finalized the room dimensions and layout. But we are still tinkering with which way doors open, and which rooms should have carpet or hardwood floors. Or even tile. Some decisions have to be made soon, others can be delayed.

We are working with the decorator on many of these decisions. I question why we have to make some decisions before others. And why there are so many decisions to make in each of our meetings with her. “Trust the process,” she says.

That’s hard to do when it takes so much imagination to see rooms above the bare foundation, let alone to see how colors we pick for walls and cabinets and other features will appear in the final home.

External paint colors: French Gray house, with white trim and Bunglehouse Blue front door. Not selected yet–the stone.

So far, we’ve selected our garage doors (why was this the first decision we had to make?), our front door, and the external paint colors. We’ve chosen appliances (and gone over our allowance to get what we wanted) and the cabinet styles (though not the layout of the cabinets yet). We’ve decided on drawer pulls, door levers (not knobs, so we’ll have greater accessibility), newel posts and spindles and the stain for the stair rail.

But we delayed the decision on towel bars—we’ll buy our own, because my husband thinks there are never enough towel bars in any bathroom. Yet how will we pick the towel bars without knowing precisely how wide the walls in the bathrooms are? Can we fit a 24” bar, or will we have to use 18” bars, or—horrors!—towel rings?

Internal paint colors: Pediment walls with white trim, and the blue/gray Cadet accent walls in a few rooms.

And future decisions loom — laying out the kitchen appliances and cupboards we’ve chosen, choosing counter tops and hardwood stains, selecting lighting fixtures (I still haven’t seen any I really like), picking stone for front of the house, . . . and I’m probably forgetting half a dozen major issues that will fill my head in the months to come.

We didn’t do all this when we built our current house in 1984. We made some changes in the floor plan—adding bay windows and increasing the foundation dimensions a bit. We also chose paint colors and wall coverings, as well as the kitchen layout. And we chose light fixtures and carpeting. But balusters? We took what was offered. Ditto on drawer pulls, towel racks, and a host of other items. Either we weren’t given the option of changing, or we didn’t care.

Our current house at about the same stage of construction. It was summer then.

Some of the builder’s choices are still in the house, others we have changed during our thirty-five-year occupancy. But we won’t be in our next home for thirty-five years. What we pick now is likely to be what stays until we’re carried out or our children move us to assisted living. So the selections seem to matter more.

“Trust the process.” How often have I heard that over my adult years? During corporate reorganizations. In Lamaze classes before childbirth. From writing instructors about plotting a novel. And now when building a house.

“Trust the process.” I don’t trust easily or lightly. I go into each meeting with the decorator certain that I’ll have a meltdown looking at twenty-seven options for staircase spindles. Or hundreds of paint chips. But she guides us into selecting between three or four possibilities. And so far it seems to be working—or else I’m not visualizing the result well enough to know it’s not working.

I just hope the process continues to work. And the weather cooperates. If all goes well, we’ll be in the new house about the Fourth of July. Independence Day. And I’ll be free of the process at last.

When have you had to trust the process?