Excerpt - Basically, It's Going to be a Nightmare: Life Lessons in Remodeling - Out June 1, 2027

A glimpse into why I chose design and remodeling as a profession

I grew up around construction so I was comfortable with dirt and dust. Our street was not paved, and every year trucks would come with fresh limestone gravel which would be spread and tapped down, splaying clouds of yellow dust into the air. For several weeks after, the road would feel new and smooth, until tires from heavy cars, with routine routes back and forth, would rut the road again, where large sloppy puddles would form and passing vehicles would splash anyone venturing to their mailbox. Mixing this with the perpetual nearby new home build assured there was always a dirt hill somewhere to play on.

The sound of hammer and nail punctuated my child-hood. Houses were either being built from the ground up, or were being expanded by adding a room here and there. Most of the original houses in our neighborhood were small, providing a young home owner something they could afford, and as careers and paychecks grew, so did the houses.

The first house my parents bought was built on a slab of concrete with a large yard surrounding it. Two bedrooms, a single kitchen with small cordoned area for mechanicals including a washer and dryer, and a combination dining-living room, as the ‘great’ room creation had not yet been dreamed of. With four children in one bedroom, it was time to build on, and with very little thought as to where, a point and a prod was all that was necessary to begin the processing of building a bedroom for my parents. My brothers then took over one of the bedrooms, and my sister and me in the other, we were set and felt expansive. Sometime later a large extension went onto the back of the house forming another bedroom, with now two more siblings, and a family room where we could watch Creature Features huddling onto a ‘hide-a-bed’ on Saturday nights.

A two-car garage went up at some point, with a basketball court behind made from two foot by two-foot patio stone, which created interesting bounces and heightened reflexes. Concrete patio with short walls made from concrete blocks surrounded several sides, chosen for the way they could be easily moved and changed when the whim to do so came over my mother. Always looking for a project, my mother was all about zip zip get it done. It was as though she couldn’t stand seeing things around her settle into a dream state. No way. Shake it up, don’t you dare get comfortable. We would come home from school with our rooms rearranged or the entrance to the patio set in a different spot. These projects could never take more than a day, and better yet, half a day. Projects started in the morning while we were at school and before we came home for lunch, would be finished bing bang boom by the time we had walked home at the end of the school day.

The permanence in my life was not the layout of my child-hood home, but rather, in the love fostered by the people surrounding my early years. I believe this is why I decided to spend my adult working life helping families find ways for their homes to work for them, providing them a little bit of solace in a hectic, fast paced world, much like my mother trying to perfect our home as the chaos of raising six kids surrounded her.