From Upset To Joy - A Change in Perspective

My husband has been building our home by hand - yes, all by himself in his spare time - over the last 25 years. I could fill a book with stories of what we’ve lived through as the house grew around us. There were winters with no insulation in half the house. There was the year I was pregnant, my oldest son was potty training and we had to go outside and up stairs to the only bathroom. There was even a time we had to crawl out a window and down a ladder to do laundry. You get the picture.

I rolled with this for the first few years, because I had it in my mind that the whole process would only take a couple of years and heck, I was tough, I could do this. And in no time the house would be finished and I’d be decorating and entertaining...

But of course that didn’t happen.

I Do: Husband, Wife and House

It turns out that our 100% DIY house project was like a 3rd very prominent person in our marriage. ‘The House’ dictated what we did every weekend and in every spare second of free time, and where every dollar went. Rooms weren’t sanctuaries because they kept changing. The ‘dining room’? We threw down a mattress and it was a bedroom; set a sheet of plywood over 2 sawhorses and it became either a workshop with a skill-saw in the middle, or a dining-room table if we pulled out the folding chairs. We couldn’t buy furniture, we didn’t entertain, there was dust everywhere.

I have to admit, that I spiraled for a few years in the middle of all of this, wondering what in the heck I’d gotten myself into. It had seemed so romantic at the beginning - Jerry and I huddling over the drafting table while he drew up our dream home complete with Victorian trim and an 'old barn' using wood milled from my parent's forest, and I at his side, championing his dream of doing everything himself…

I just had no idea how long it would take. Sadly the statistics were against us - turns out that 70% of all marriages fail during major house remodels - and that’s for folks who hire a crew to come in and do all the work in a few months. I don’t even want to know the statistics for those who spend-their-entire-adult-lives-building-a-house-around-themselves.

Craving a sanctuary
I longed for just a single room, one finished space that I could decorate, put furniture in, invite people into. One tiny sanctuary in the middle of all of the chaos that I could make into a home. But I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

About 7 years in, I was crying on a girlfriend’s shoulder and she piped up with "For Every Upset is an Unmet Expectation". I responded "But mine are reasonable, normal expectations!"

She said "Reasonable - yes. But they aren’t REAL expectations. And all you can control are your expectations."

She was right, of course.
I was stuck in a pity-fest just because my expectations didn’t reflect reality.

For every upset is an unmet expectation
So - if I was upset because we didn’t have indoor plumbing or my dining room doubled as a bedroom, or we were protected from the elements by a double wall of plastic, there was nothing I could do to change the situation. I could only control how I reacted. If I was upset, it was time for ME to change MY expectations!

This was huge - a monumental shift in how I thought about, not just ‘The House’, but everything.

I am in control of my expectations
Think about it - if you go to the ocean expecting to build sandcastles in the sunshine, you’ll be upset if it rains. But if you go expecting to bundle up against the elements, drink hot mulled wine in a cozy cabin with a roaring fire, the rain doesn’t upset you. And if you go prepared for all possibilities, then you can roll with whatever nature hands to you and in the process open yourself up to enjoy it no matter what!

I finally had the right words to tell Jerry why I was upset all of the time. So to help me set realistic expectations, he taped his detailed task spreadsheet to the walls. He also shared with me his estimate as to how much time each task and each project would take. It was a great visual reality-check and I finally understood, and respected, all of the behind-scene stuff that went into each project and what needed to happen before even the ‘simplest’ tasks could be checked off. And I learned to multiply by 3 to allow for the unexpected.

In fact I’ve found that for every project I work on, I multiply my realistic time expectation by 3 to allow for the unexpected.

Because of this mind-shift, I started to see the changing rooms as opportunities - a chance to slowly, organically figure out how I wanted them to look. Heck, I could try out different paint colors without taping or worrying about the floor. I could take my time choosing tile, making sure that my choices weren’t based on the going fad, but rather a look that I could live with over time, I could wait to buy appliances until the ones we wanted went on sale.

Once I stopped expecting things to be done more quickly, I was able to celebrate little accomplishments and details like our gorgeous door hinges, the beautiful brick 'rug' on the porch that Jerry made with stones we collected on the beach, the coyote prints running through our Saltillo terra-cotta tile on the kitchen floor, the day the living room became a permanent living room and I was able to buy a sofa. Instead of moaning about not being able to entertain friends for dinner, I accepted that we wouldn’t have a dining room for awhile, and created a annual outdoor Summer Solstice Party for hundreds of friends and family.

Being open to changing my expectations, I realized I could control whether situations made me upset, or brought me joy.

Adjust expectations as new events unfold
Turns out that setting expectations is a fluid endeavor - that to open ourselves up to joy, we need to be flexible and comfortable with changing expectations as life is thrown at us.

Inside of the barn - Jerry created the old look by using wood milled from my parent's forest

We are now way past the plastic walls and have furniture and dedicated rooms, and are now deep into the fun stuff - the finish work. However, about a month ago, Jerry pulled out old pine beams that had been salvaged from an old factory. He had set them aside for our grand staircase only to find that in the years of storage they had been attacked by insects. He was devastated and at a loss of what to do - no way could we ever afford to replace them.

He took me out to look, and I expected to be devastated too. Instead, what I saw was beauty - these beams were full of texture and interest! I asked him to look at them in a different way: Instead of the pristine wood he was expecting, we now had something even better: wormhole wood!

I left him there with that thought - and I swear that I didn’t put her up to this - but right after I went back inside, our neighbor stopped by and raved at our beautiful wormhole wood beams!

Jerry created a craftsman feel to the breezeway connecting our house and ‘barn’ (garage).

Seek Beauty, Create Joy
It’s all in how we look at things. We get to decide whether to be upset or whether to seek beauty and create joy - by adjusting our expectations, we are in control of creating our own joy!

This concept is beautifully applicable when it comes to setting expectations around family, friends, big feasts and the Holidays. (In part 2, which I'll send to you on Thanksgiving Day, I’ll share what we did when our appliances started shutting down one T-Day, so stay tuned!)

Of course setting realistic expectations applies to big life-changing events as well as to the little stuff like how we react to the annoying woman who cuts in line at the supermarket, or the guy who cut us off on the freeway. Perhaps even how we survive a difficult family dynamic during the Holidays.

I would love to hear from you! Is there something that typically upsets you during the Holidays? How can you shift your expectations so that you aren’t upset by what is out of your control?

From Upset To Joy - A Change in Perspective (Part 1)

From Upset To Joy - A Change in Perspective