If you do things…

At our wedding, Sean made a great toast which centered around a mantra Gene used to repeat when the two of them lived together: “If you do things, they get done.” I guess Gene’s mellowed with age, because in our family now the mantra seems to be “If you need something done and you wait long enough you’ll discover that Gene has a friend who does that thing professionally and then you’ll pay that friend to do the thing which will, consequently, get done.”

His first mantra was catchier, I admit, but this way he has more free time.

When we moved into this house there were three major projects we agreed we would do: landscape the backyard, remodel the kitchen and replace the windows. It took a few years for Gene to really examine his contacts list, but eventually he discovered that a friend from KALX is also a professional carpenter — windows! — and a friend from one of his RPGs is also a general contractor — yard! So our windows are in the process of being replaced right now, and on Monday Gene’s going to pass our yard plans along to his contractor friend and see if this is a project he can do for us. The only thing left to do is to remodel the kitchen, and to do that I need to figure out what I want in there.

I’ve already mentioned the pressure I feel to live up to this house, and completely changing a major room in it is going to be the thing that makes or breaks our relationship. It can’t just look like a Craftsman kitchen but secretly be made of plywood substitutes from Ikea. It has to be a Craftsman kitchen. The whole soul of the house depends on honesty, integrity and quality; if I cut corners the house will know. And it will fall down on me in my sleep.

My options now are to haunt design blogs and painstakingly collect honest, high-quality kitchen ideas, then price them all and figure out who should do the work and schedule everything and budget and save…or I can wait until Gene remembers he has a friend who is a time-traveling 1920s woodworker specializing in kitchens.

Unfortunately, he only knows a couple of time-travelers and coincidentally they’re both bankers from the 1860s, so until he meets more people I’ll need to get to work.