A few of our friends and relatives have cautioned us, eyes wide with horror about the tales of our new house, to avoid arguing about all of it. “Oh my god! Don’t wind up getting a divorce over it!” Funny thing is, we don’t really argue about it. We have two distinct domains of expertise, and two different planning styles. But being consciously aware and having discussed it defuses the stress.
I trust her grasp of finance implicitly (she’s a CPA, for chrissake), and she leaves the technical details to me. I do not want to be bothered with calculating the time value of money, or calculating how to juggle funds – just tell me how much we have to spend, and I will tailor the project to fit the limits. With the entire range of puzzles and mysteries both houses are presenting to me, I have all I need to occupy my mind, thanks very much.
Likewise, I’m not going to bother trying to get Camille to be interested in why an aliphatic resin emulsion is better than cyanoacrylate for cementing MDF, or why I used 23 gauge instead of 15 gauge nails on the crown. That is, unless she needs to know because it affects the bottom line. It is a healthy thing in a relationship to have a domain that you can call your own, and to be entrusted to it. She trusts my advice about what things we can and cannot cut corners on, and I trust her opinions about how to afford it. She’s happy when I deliver a highly polished, professional project, and I’m happy to get to do them.
I realized that we think about money at different points in the process. She wants a reasonably firm number up front, before she will allow herself to consider numerous options, while I don’t want to think about cost at all until I have a several designs sketched and a materials list developed. It is the materials list that gives me the “hard numbers” from which I pare things away until I reach my budget limit. I might design a Rolls Royce and wind up with a Yugo, but at least I have thoughtfully considered the entire universe of choices before I started discarding ideas to make tradeoffs on the way to the final product.
In the case of the kitchen, we might decide on some sort of intermediate plan, such as building a wooden counter top that allows me to tear out the tile and accurately discover the extent of hidden damage, while we accumulate the funds to do a full-tilt boogie. But that remains to be seen, because I really want to develop a set of design sketches that we can discuss and choose from. If we have to rip everything out, then we should completely redesign for better ergonomics and traffic flow. It is a perfect opportunity to create something wonderful.