Vibes

  My teenage son and I had an interesting talk the other day about “vibes.” He’s always been perceptive, but in this conversation he described the depth of his perceptions with astonishing eloquence. Most of us know when something just doesn’t “feel” right, but less frequently we listen to those instincts, dissect them and react appropriately.

When I was negotiating the purchase of the house I now live in, I brought my kids over to walk through it. It was important to me to give them a picture in their heads about the place they were likely to call home. Of course, I warned them that the current owners still inhabited the place, but I had also unreasonably assumed that my children would be able to see beyond the huge furniture, dark walls, cloaked windows, and Hagrid-like interiors to the Harry-like home, and understand the space minus the people who were living here. My son (at age 11) couldn’t. In fact, he couldn’t get out of this house fast enough and ended up in tears with deep unsettle. Nothing felt right to him about this house, and when I realized the perception he was getting, I didn’t blame him one bit. He was right; everything about the place in its current state threw horrible vibes.

My mother ended up having a phone conversation with him that almost immediately calmed him down. She later told me what she said to Jims: “I told him to trust you. I told him to wait until you get your hands on the place, because when you get done, it will feel like home.”

My incentive to do just that was enormous, of course. It's an absolute essential that my kids feel good in my home! From this experience, my whole perspective on design changed. It went from how can I make this look nice to how can I make this feel right. Interiors must throw good vibes.  No fakers allowed.

Number Five

I am going to renege. Sort of. Since August I have been retelling an old account. All of this blogging has been an effort of several intentional attempts in this order: (1) to help promote my business, (2) to keep you interested as a reader, (3) to keep me interested as a writer, (4) to document a tiny bit of history for my children’s posterity, and (5) to show the quiet evolution of something that I think we all can relate to if we take the time to try. However, in this process, Number Five surprised me and told me that it should be bumped up the list. In fact, Number Five screamed it at me.

I didn’t ever envision myself as or designer, or “sculptor” as one once described me, or an “artist” as another later would. But I am, and all this history that I’ve been sharing laid the groundwork for me to finally begin to own that. So now, with more than half this story told, and at a crucial turning point, Number Five is requiring me to finish this story first and share it with you and others later in a different format.

Therein lies the reneging. This blog will no longer be telling the story of how I became a designer, but it’s going to jump ahead and offer my personal—which naturally spills over to my professional—takes on the process. I will be writing in tandem for the next several weeks if not months, and I may, from time to time, share bits of the original story as it further unfurls for me in the privacy of my living room, but please bear with me as I try to keep this new tangent online interesting for all of us!

I love that you all are reading and I hope you wish me luck and stick with me as I try to fulfill Number Five’s demands while offering you different bits on this site.  Hopefully one will sustain the other!

With much thanks and love,

PS-Heim: Uzticība.

The Creation of Destruction

The rebuilding of the Girard house would become a very long process that would consume our lives for over a year. We optimistically figured that the fire’s damage had given us a clean slate to build something better. It seemed simple: cut out the charred bits and replace them with something new and fresh.

I was at the Girard house every day overseeing this process (and learning a whole lot about construction) when it occurred to me that I couldn’t prevent the smoke from seeping back inside. And we all know, where there is smoke, there is fire, and damage could easily be re-done. It was a scary feeling to realize "new and fresh" wasn’t good enough. It was becoming clear that not only the charred bits needed replacing, but the whole thing needed to become fire resistant. The destruction wasn’t over. Even though walls were being rebuilt and tall trusses were being lifted high, nothing was guaranteed against going up in smoke again, and I didn't like the odds.  There seemed to be a festering dichotomy at work.

Someone, I wish I could remember who, recently pointed out to me the theory that “At any given time we are contributing to either the cycle of creation or destruction in our lives. Both are necessary, but just know which one you are contributing to.” Is it possible to contribute to both?

Smoke and the Suite Life

We woke up the next morning thinking it was all a bad dream, but the musty burning smell of smoke followed us everywhere. The guest room at my in-laws where we slept smelled like it, the kid’s pajamas smelled like it, the inside of our cars smelled like it, and even the cats smelled like it. The effects of the fire reached every tiny corner of our lives and I couldn't wash it off my hands.

The next few days were, of course, a crazy blur of activity and it was hard to know who to trust. There are protocols to these things, but when your house doesn’t catch fire every day, it’s a steep learning curve! We thanked God for our wonderful insurance agents on an hourly basis. They were a speed dial on my phone for a year after all this.

The fire department and insurance company launched investigations. Interestingly, the source of the fire was found, but the cause was never determined. The fire department closed the case and the insurance company opened one. With that, they approved restoration companies to take care of our belongings. I’ll never forget the little grandma-lady who showed up the next morning with such authority. She took my hands, apologized for my loss, asked about my kids, and then looked directly into my eyes and said, “I’m going to take your house, turn it upside down and shake it. Every little scrap that falls out I am going to label, pack up, clean, repair and store it for you until your house is ready to move back in. Then I’m going to unpack and arrange it exactly the way you want. Everything will be catalogued and returned like new, I promise.” This seemed like an incredible task, but that’s exactly what she and her team did over the next three days from the biggest piece of furniture to the lost pennies and paperclips found within the cushions. Another company took everything made of fabric—clothing, linens, towels, mattresses, sleeping bags, etc.They told us to put a weeks worth of clothing into special duffle bags and they would have them back to us clean and restored in a few days. They even offered to take the winter coats of our backs (they really smelled). The rest would be ready in few weeks and stored until we were ready to take delivery.  Everyone promised that the stinging smell of smoke would be fullly removed from everything as they hauled it all away in a mountain of carefully labeled and numbered boxes. (By the way, five years later, I’m still clipping the yellow paper tags off the odd table cloth or rarely worn blouse, and peeling the identifying sticker off a serving bowl or picture frame.)

Not only did we need to oversee this incredible task of clean up and move out, but we had to find a place to live. Staying with my inlaws was certainly helpful in the immediate short term, but they didn’t have room for us to live there for any length of time. We needed our own space anyway. The insurance company again was wonderful and just told us to find whatever we needed, a long term hotel, apartment, or whatever, and it would be paid for. That was relieving, but still not easy. We looked at extended stay hotels and apartment complexes with short term leases. None of these things suited our family, and few of them would allow our kitty cats. Then we found the “Suite Life,” a small, very clean apartment complex in Royal Oak, across from the high school, that offered fully furnished apartments available for short term lease. They were marketed for month-to-month corporate use. Not only was this logistically convenient, but they had a two bedroom apartment available, a laundry facility, an in-ground pool that would be opened in the spring, and no problem with our kids or cats. The apartment was completely stocked with bedding, blankets, pots, pans, dishes, gadgets, towels and even a vacuum cleaner--Eureka. I just hoped we wouldn't stink it up.  We signed the lease and paid the first and last month’s rent on Friday night, two days after the fire.

The next day, March 5, marked our 11th wedding anniversary. Grandma and Grandpa kept the kids while my husband and I moved our very few belongings to the Suite Life--we were back to 100 lbs. of home. Then we did something we hadn't done together in years: we went grocery shopping. It was fun, but also pretty obscene. We had to buy everything from toilet paper to salt. The Suite Life had no consumables. After filling three huge carts, we brought everything into the apartment by passing it through a window to save us from hiking back and forth through the parking lot and around the complex. It was comical, but felt good to have some control again.

When it was all put away, we went out for dinner. We drank to our 11 years, our very recent blessing of safety, our resilient kids, and yet another adventure together. Sitting in that restaurant, exhausted, but able to exhale for the first time in three days, we figured that if we could get through this, we could get through anything.  (As if we'd never done anything hard before.) At that I wiped a tear from my eye, but I could still smell the smoke.
 

The Scene

Girard Avenue was covered in thick ice and flashing lights when I pulled up 20 minutes later, a drive I only remember as white-knuckled and fast, trying not to show panic to my kids. My husband had arrived just ahead of me. We deposited two very nervous kids into the warm and calm arms of Laura and her husband. Laura said that she saw thick, black smoke coming from the soffits of our family room. After calling the fire department (immediately before calling me), she learned that neighbors on the street behind us, more than 350 feet away, had already reported the billowing smoke coming from our house.

I’ll never forget my first approach to our house. Artificial light gave a creepy illumination to soot-covered snow and layers of ice. Strange people were stalking our property with uninvited determination. Our belongings were being haughtily thrown out of the door way and windows. I saw my grandpa’s chair leaning against the fence, completely charred and missing an arm, opposite leg, and half of its back. A clear casualty. The gravity of the situation hit me then.

The firemen were reluctant to spend too much time with us at that moment because they were still working inside. Men were in danger inside our home. We asked if there was any sign of our two cats. There hadn’t been, but we couldn’t believe the quick response they made to find them. Within minutes a fireman produced our shell shocked kitties and said he found them huddled together under our bed. We brought them to Jims & Sis thinking that the four would benefit from some mutual care.

When the all-clear was given, we could assess, but there was still chaos. (Talk about creating tension with black!) Someone shoved a business card in my hand and told us his crew would take care of everything. What? Crew? Who are you? “An emergency construction service. We’ll cover the broken windows and doors and come back and repair your house in the morning.” We seemed to have little choice in the matter. Things were completely out of our control.

My husband went inside to assess the damage, and when he came out, he reported that there was no way we could spend the night here. The fire was very localized as was the firemen’s inflicted but necessary damage, but the smoke damage was very significant and permeated the house. I wanted to see.

When I entered our house through the family room door in the back, with the flashlight, most everything in that room appeared untouched, but the stench was overwhelming and stinging. Nauseating. My slight fear was that I’d forgotten to unplug the iron and that it started this whole mess, but I found the iron on top of the ironing board with the cord and plug wound neatly just as I had apparently left it. (Phew) We found Sissy’s very best friend, a stuffed polar bear named Lacis sitting on the family room couch. She would later cry with relief and reluctantly acquiesce to giving him a bath later that night.

When the scene (and that’s really what it felt like: a dirty crime scene, not my home) shifted from the family room to the dining room and kitchen, I almost couldn’t look. A gaping hole had been hacked in the corner where the fire had originated exposed the outside. Icy water was everywhere; things that once hung proudly on the walls were littered all over the floor and covered in sludge; Winnie’s dining room set was not only amputated of my grandpa’s chair which was left out to die in the driveway, but also was veiled in the white film of water damage and huge gashes among countless lacerations. I moved on quickly to gather essentials in the bedrooms. Furniture in all the bedrooms had been tossed and closet contents flung wide in the firemen’s effort to find the cats. We grabbed my jewelry box, passports and birth certificates, filled a duffle bag with a few clothes, found Jims’ Tiger and fish blanket, and my husband moved his valuable map collection to our neighbor’s house for safe keeping. Beyond that, we could only hope that the contents of our lives wouldn’t be looted over night, and we left to spend the rest of the night at my in-laws.

 

Routine at Stake

 We were waiting for building permits to be approved and for our contractor to wrap up another job before we could get to work on our addition. March 2, 2005 was a Wednesday. As per Routine, we spent Wednesday evenings at church for dinner and family activities. Routine dictated that I took the kids and that my husband met us there directly after work. He hadn’t yet arrived that evening at about 6:30 pm when I got the call.

My next door neighbor and friend, Laura, knew our Routine, so I thought it strange to see her name pop up on the caller ID of my mobile phone. I answered her with a friendly chirp, although it was hard to hear because of all the activity going on around me. She sounded a bit strained and asked if we were at church. Yes. She asked if the kids and my husband were there with me. I explained. Then with very calm and deliberate words, Laura delivered this:

Come home now. Your house is on fire.

Routine was being burned alive.

Build Up

Our life on Girard Avenue was about three years old when we decided it was time to think about putting on an addition, and the plan was ambitious. We wanted to build up and put a second floor on top of Girard’s walls. Routine was about to take a sabbatical, thank the Lord. We sketched and scaled and came up with a plan to add two big bedrooms, a loft area, a kid bathroom and a mechanical room that would not only house the furnace, hot water heater and laundry, but also another full bathroom. It would add about another 1000 square feet.

As soon as the new 2005 got underway, we started interviewing building contractors and found one who not only shared our vision, but had architectural plans drawn up to prove it. We intended to live in the house as the addition was being built, and the prospect of the whole process was exciting. We were reliving something here, and this time, we felt it would be for keeps. So we had a good and planned adventure on our hands! Or so we thought.