Last week, we had the walk through of the house at the framing stage. VERY exciting to see the outline of a real “house” there. VERY stressful to be asked a million questions like this:

Come into this room, switch here for light, fan, over here is where your center light will go. You can have can lights, too. Do you want cans? Where do you want electrical outlets? Which walls, how many? High up (like for wall-mounted cable) or low? Do you like the windows here in this room? What about over here? Closet door goes here, opens this way. Everything good? OK, onto the next room.

I’M SORRY BUT THAT IS TOO DAMN MANY THINGS FOR ME TO ANSWER ALL AT ONCE! I have NO idea if I want recessed lighting in the basement den or the home office or anywhere other than the kitchen. I hadn’t thought about it. I like to weigh the pros and cons, think through how this will help or potentially hurt me with decorating options later on. I like to peruse magazines and pictures online to get a feel for things.

Basically, I needed to have put together a plan to decorate EACH AND EVERY ROOM IN THE HOUSE before the framing walk thru so I could have an idea of what was happening in each room which in turn would have given me more confidence to answer the builder’s questions.

And I had a few questions of my own. Like our breakfast nook. Our wonderful, much dreamed-about feature. The one and only thing I had a picture to show the builder. (“Show us a picture, we’ll build it,” he said.) Here’s our inspiration picture:

But our breakfast nook is TOO small. We’ll have to have a table built and even with the smallest possible table, there is NO room for chairs on the front side (and no room for more than 2 of our plates). It’s too close to the kitchen island so there would be no room to walk. THIS MEANS THERE’S NO ROOM FOR A HIGH CHAIR. WHICH MEANS I MIGHT HAVE TO ACTUALLY USE THE FREAKIN’ DINING ROOM ALL THE TIME CUZ I DON’T KNOW WHERE/HOW ELSE WE’LL EAT. THE BREAKFAST NOOK IS UNUSABLE. The architect was an idiot about this area. Great on other things but left his measuring tape in the car when he designed the nook. The nook, my favorite, beautiful, cozy place where the family (and a couple of friends) were going to enjoy meals, play cards, and relax. The nook that now might be the “kids table” at Thanksgiving.

I am pissed.

One solution is to move the door that leads from the nook to the patio; we’d have to move it into the great room. So as you enter the house and walk down the hall, you would see a door at the end of the hall. Not a tragedy. But that doesn’t give us room for chairs. That just gives us room to make the built-in banquette a little longer on one end so a person can sit. In order to get room for chairs, we have to decrease the size of our island.

Now, our island is our main prep surface. It’s currently configured for a sink with about 2′ of space on either side for prep. Dishwaser on one side, trash pull out on the other. Looks like I’m going to lose the trash pullout and have to have a trash can sitting out somewhere. Again, not a tragedy. But lopping off the island means I’m losing prep space and storage below.

I’m pissed, I tell ya. We have a dining room (which we’ll rarely use) that’s too big and a kitchen with an eat-in nook that’s too small (and that we’ll use all the time).

I hope I don’t hate it when it’s all said and done.