Hatin' on life at the moment.

I'm stressed.

Planning general layouts wasn't excruciating - that was fun, for the most part. But now we're making small decisions that all need to fit together like pieces in a puzzle - but at least with a puzzle, you can SEE the pieces and know what fits and what doesn't.

With kitchen materials, I'm groping around in the dark, trying to visualize a room with dark porcelain tile floors (don't get me started on the details in that), one or two or both of those Ikea cabinet faces mentioned in the previous entry, paint on the walls based on a small chip from Home Depot, beadboard goes where exactly?, dimensions of the banquette seating area, can we fit a built-in bar area in the other corner of the dining room?, hardware, faucets, an island that coordinates but isn't matched exactly to the cabinet/countertop color scheme, a glass tile mosaic backsplash that matches the countertops and the walls and the overall style we're going for, and all of it has to look cozy and airy instead of antiseptic and stark.

I'm tired of trying to multiply costs for materials and comparing differences between 50 types of tile or paint, I'm tired of having a million tabs open in this browser while I hunt through millons of pictures to try and find something that can help me picture all of this. I hate thinking about sofas and end tables. Colors for the bedroom. Pocket doors. Where our bed will fit. Furniture for the office. Molding. Flooring colors. All we could do at Floor and Decor today was take pictures of things we were interested in, because we don't have the blueprints and dimensions that'll tell us the amounts we'll need to buy.



It's just too much uncertainty, too many choices, too much time spent thinking on this and making decisions and worrying about timelines.
We're ready for things to be finished, ready to get going on the next phase of our lives, and it's still months away.

I'm also trying to file away a lot of the stresses we went through this summer and get back into some disciplined habits - all while I'm hitting the ground running at 6 each morning, spending my days trying to learn how to be a teacher without a teacher's degree.

Too many thoughts to think, and I have a feeling that's where these stomach aches are coming from. Nate's a little worried I've given myself an ulcer.

So anyway. If I'm out of commission or glazed over or tense lately, these are the reasons why.

This is an ugly post, I know. I don't exactly like whining to the internet . . . but the point of this blog is to document what's really going on in our lives during this whole process - and with an entry like this, I want to read it in a week or a month or two months and feel proud of how far we've come and how we DID make these decisions that seem so overwhelming right now. Recording the downsides so we can remember just how accomplished we can feel when this is all over.