New House Stress + The Never-Ending Search for Perfection

We just spent our third weekend in a row working on our new house. I'm exhausted, I woke up with neck pain like I haven't had in months, my hands are dry and cracking around the cuticles, and I'm confused, because on Pinterest and A Beautiful Mess they make home improvement projects look so glamorous and easy!?

Right. 

Since we closed on January 15th, we've spent every spare, waking weekend hour at our new house, preparing it for our move-in date at the end of February. Before we'd gotten in there and started painting, we would tell people, "We're not moving in yet, because we want to paint all of the walls and do a bit of work on it first, so we're going to paint the whole house and then move in after."

Right. 

We, two people who had never done ANY home improvement projects in our lives, were just going to paint the whole house--remove a little wallpaper, patch up a few nail holes, ya know--and in one month's worth of weekends, would be ready to move in. 

Ha! How foolish we were! As I explained in our "Challenges of Buying a Home" podcast, we have no idea what we're doing, so we're having to teach ourselves everything as we go along. Don't get me wrong, we're having fun and it feels good to do everything ourselves, but wow, things are moving sloooooooooowly. 

In 3 full weekends (minus the time spent teaching yoga, buying groceries, and eating meals), we've only done the following:

• Removed the wallpaper in the downstairs bathroom
• Painted the downstairs bathroom (not trim, just walls)
• Removed the wallpaper in the kitchen (which pulled off big chunks of the wall, which meant we had to spend a day basically creating a new wall with two layers of spackle)
• Painted the kitchen (not trim, just walls)
• Primed the tile backsplash in the kitchen
• Removed all kitchen cabinet doors and primed kitchen cabinets (not doors, JUST cabinets)

Although yes, this is a lot when I look at it and think about how much work has gone into it, it also leaves a TON to be done before we move on February 22nd. We haven't painted any of the main rooms, we haven't removed the wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom (I hate wallpaper! Ahhhhhhh!), we haven't replaced any of the light fixtures yet, etc., etc., etc., I could go on forever. 

But this post isn't about just listing all of my home-improvement to-dos and telling you how overwhelmed we are [although we are overwhelmed], it's about how we're handling that overwhelm, and how we could do a better job at dealing with our stress. 

Letting go of expectations is challenging, but it's a big part of life. Most projects take much longer than you think they will, and in the case of big projects, like buying a house and re-working it room by room, what you think will be a quick paint job turns into rebuilding a wall--pulling out appliances, cutting wires, and patching up holes (in the case of our kitchen). 

We're in love with our new house, we're crazy excited about living there, we're SO ready to move in, but we're also super stressed about wanting it to be perfect, RIGHT NOW. This urge is not a healthy one, and we both know it's not possible and we'll only get done what we can get done, but we're each handling the acceptance of this realization in our own way, mostly by obsessing about the small things that we think will make a big difference [but actually won't]. 

Last night, as I spent way too much time trying to decide which shower curtain to buy for our downstairs bathroom, Ben was doing something similar by looking into fireplace screens and researching installing a flagpole (SO not a priority in my book!?).  After scrolling through literally hundreds of shower curtains and putting about 10 into my carts on various sites, I got so overwhelmed that I gave up and went to bed. It felt like the whole world was resting on this shower curtain purchase, and I couldn't take the pressure so I just gave up. 

Then, when I woke up this morning, one of the first things that Ben said to me, after "Good morning," was, "We've gotta get that shower curtain today, it's clutch." 

Um, is it? Is it imperative that we get a shower curtain for our downstairs bathroom today? Three weeks before we move in? And even though there's already a plain shower curtain in there and we have two in our current house that work just fine? Is this really life or death!?!?!?

No, if it's not already obvious to you, it's not. No shower curtain is the answer to our anxieties over wanting our house to be perfect, and until we can really accept that this is going to be a slow, life-long process, we'll just keep spinning our wheels looking for the one thing that will make everything better. 

I know how this works, I've been here many times before, and yet, I still find myself getting caught up in the need for perfection and the external search for that thing, or those things, that will assuage the stress for a little while, until the next thing comes up [a new TV stand!].

How about a little patience, Ben and Mary Catherine? How about you practice what you preach and focus instead on being present, enjoying the experience of working together on your first house, and on having fun as you move through the process at your own pace? How about you stop all the searching and instead, just live your life? 

Oh, wouldn't that be wonderful. 

[And you know what else would be wonderful? If Google and Facebook would stop their creepy cyber-stalking, so that every website I visit wouldn't show me shower curtains in the ads on the sidebar...NOT HELPING, GOOGLE!!!]

So here's my ultimate question and focus for the week ahead: Can we pause the search long enough to realize how pointless it is in the first place?  Can we have fun picking out a shower curtain and remember that in the end, it doesn't matter one iota? 

I don't want to spend my life obsessing over shower curtains, just like I don't want to spend it stressed about that email I haven't answered, or the fact that Ben really wants to install a flagpole in our front yard (WTF!?!).

It all comes back to being mindful. What do you think, can we work together to try and stop the search? 

PS. I thought you'd find it funny that on my blog editorial calendar, I had today marked down as a "New House Update!" post. When I wrote that a few weeks ago, I was thinking that by this time, 3 weeks in, I'd have tons of fun before + after pics to share with you. So niave, that version of me!