Hiring A Professional
Sarah Van Arsdale Friday, September 14, 2007 at 5:01AM So, great. I now have a plan for the electrical problem, and just have to wait for the guy to send me the estimate.
Meanwhile, my friend Seddy came by for lunch and mentioned, more than once, that her sister is starting an interior design business. I mean, she mentioned it enough that I realized it was like when someone offers you a breath mint—you should always accept, even if you don’t want a breath mint right then, because the person may be trying to tell you something.
So I took down her number and called Seddy’s sister. She is a woman of action; before I knew it, we had an appointment and then she was at my door, having lugged up a couple of beautiful cloth-covered file boxes, each one, it turned out, filled with wallpaper samples, and decorating magazines, and paint chips.
She was here for like three hours, taking photos, as I, shame-faced, showed her around my apartment. Now I am thinking maybe I could just go back to California where I went camping with my brother last year and set up a tent permanently in Point Reyes and forget all about wall color and fabric. I mean, look at the view from a campsite:
Not that she didn’t have good ideas—the problem is that she had great ideas, great, expensive, time-consuming, utterly overwhelming ideas.
The thing is, some people are just born with an eye for making a place look pulled together. And then there are the rest of us shmegegies.
But I’m already in, having ponied up the initial fee—and I have to say, she must have been giving me a break on the fee, because it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. So now I have to see what ideas she comes up with. I mean, she says she’s going to look up everything for me, from new ceiling fans to a proper light for the front hall.
And that way, I won’t have to listen to my brother sing his camping song every morning. (Around the family, we call him “Songhound.”)
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