I made this decision last night. By Monday afternoon, I had most parts of my closet chandelier finished and ready to go. Over the weekend, I cut all of the “stems” to the correct lengths. I also had to cut the bottom metal piece on the actual chandelier shorter so that the two pieces would fit together properly. And then I got the actual chandelier, the stems attachment, and all of the smaller pieces (chain, ceiling rings, etc.) primed and painted. So those were ready to go.

I had all of the pieces in place to make this light installation quick and easy.

I had also pre-fit the two pieces together, testing out exactly how and where the arms of the chandelier needed to go inside the stems attachment so that the stems and flowers wouldn’t interfere with the lights on the chandelier. I got those marked so that putting it together once the chandelier was hung would be pretty simple.

After my time with my friends, I was back home and sanding the flowers, prepping them for primer and paint, and that’s when it hit me. I had a sneaking suspicion that I hadn’t made enough flowers.

I had three rows of 16 stems on my chandelier, and I had made 38 flowers plus one extra in case one broke. Yes, that’s right. My stupid math-challenged brain sabotaged me once again. I tried to do math in my head, and I forgot to carry the one. I didn’t need 38 flowers. I needed FORTY-EIGHT flowers. I was ten flowers short.

Honestly, I would have cried, but I didn’t even have enough energy for that. These last two-and-a-half weeks have absolutely drained me. I feel like I can’t get anything done. I can’t concentrate on anything. I have no focus. And I’m being pulled in every direction. Let me explain.

I’ve already told y’all that on July 4th, I had to take Cooper to the emergency vet clinic because he was regurgitating his food. I arrived at 5:00pm and didn’t leave the clinic until 11:00pm. He left there in such a sad state after being anesthetized so that they could get scans, which showed that he has a tumor in his chest that has caused megaesophagus. The megaesophagus is what is causing him to regurgitate his food. So that led to me spending hours online trying to figure out how to feed and care for a dog with megaesophagus.

By that next Monday, July 7th, he was doing much better. I was still trying to figure out the food/feeding issue, and he was still regurgitating some (but not all) of his food. But he was experiencing regurgitation mostly during the night, so I was getting very poor sleep. I only get 5.5 to 6 hours of sleep each night as it is, so having that sleep interrupted with worry and caring for a dog and making sure that he doesn’t aspirate on whatever it is that he’s regurgitating was causing me to be exhausted and drained during the day, leading to some very unproductive days.

But we were making it. And as the week progressed, he seemed to be doing much better. Until Thursday. That’s when I was trying to get my closet island finished, and he was hanging out in the bedroom with me as I was trying to get the island drawers and doors installed after I had resanded and repainted them. That morning, he had been his normal self — energetic, playful, and following me around like my shadow. But as the day went on, he seemed to become more lethargic. And as I was in the bedroom working with the drawers, he turned his back to me and that’s when I noticed that he had a huge knot on the back of his back right leg. It hadn’t been there that morning, so this was something that developed over the course of a day.

And when I say “knot”, I mean that the thing was the size of a large sweet potato. It was so big that it was displacing his tail, pushing it way over to the side. It was already after normal office hours, and I just didn’t have it in me to go back to the emergency clinic and be there for hours on end, so I decided that I’d take him the next day. I got up the next morning, took pictures of my finished island so that I could write my blog post, and the whole time, Cooper was following me like he usually does. But by that time, the thing on the back of his leg had started bleeding. So he was leaving a trail of blood drops everywhere he went. If you look back at the pictures of that post about the finished island, you can see his blood drops all over the floor.

So at 7:30am, as soon as the vet office opened, I called and made an emergency appointment and they got me in that afternoon. Thank goodness the regular vet allows for emergency visits because their normal schedule didn’t have an opening for three weeks. So early afternoon, I loaded him back up and we went to the vet. She assured me that this didn’t have anything to do with the thing in his chest, and after shaving the area and taking a close look at it, she said he had three large puncture wounds in the back of his leg.

Puncture wounds? What the heck would have caused puncture wounds? Still, to this day, I have no idea what could have caused puncture wounds, and certainly not THREE large puncture wounds. I’ve searched his yard, the house, everywhere he goes. I can’t find anything. Anyway, they got it cleaned up as best they could and prescribed him antibiotics and a topical wash that I’m supposed to use daily. So I brought him back home, and he continued to drop blood trails all over the house for the next two days.

By Monday, he was feeling much better again, almost back to his normal self. I was still trying to figure out the megaesophagus food and feeding schedule, but at that point, I was also afraid to let him out into his yard during the day unsupervised. So at that point, I having to go from feeding him one big meal a day (unsupervised, with no time constraints on me), to feeding him four times a day, which has to be supervised because he has to be upright for 20 minutes after each meal (which is very challenging for an energetic dog), but I was also now having to take him out, supervised and on a leash) about five times a day.

And all of this on top of the fact that Matt can’t feed himself. He hasn’t been able to feed himself ever since he was released from his last hospital stay in February 2024. Plus, there’s all of the other things I have to do for Matt throughout the day.

I honestly don’t mean this to sound like I’m complaining. I’m not complaining. I’m just explaining. I’m exhausted. I feel like my days are spent caring for Matt, which has never really been a problem because Matt and I have a system. A schedule. We’ve kind of worked together like a well-oiled machine. That was doable for me. But now a wrench has been thrown into the gears of that machine because I now have to spend all of this time caring for Cooper and figuring out this new schedule with the multiple supervised feedings throughout the day, and supervised outside time several times a day, and sleepless nights with me being awakened by every little sound that Cooper makes because I’m worried that he’ll regurgitate and aspirate and get pneumonia (the leading cause of death of dogs with megaesophagus). And that’s leaving little to no time left for me to get things done that need to be done. And even when I try, I’m trying to push through feeling exhausted and with a mind that is so tired that I can’t even do a simple math problem. I feel like I have barely been able to keep my head above water for the last two-and-a-half weeks.

So I need a break. I need time to figure this out, and to figure out a schedule that we can all live with. And I need sleep and rest. So I’m going to take a few days away from the blog and focus on those things for a while. My plan is to take a week-and-a-half and be back on August 4th. That will at least take some of the pressure off of me to get projects done every day while I figure this out. I do plan to keep working as time allows, and I’m really hoping that I can came back on August 4th with a completely finished chandelier, a framed doorway, and a completely finished closet. But right now, all I can think about is that I need a nap.

I started to think back about our original plans for the house and the original addition we had planned to build onto the back of our house. That addition would have included a brand-new master bedroom, family room, and laundry room. But what about the closet? I didn’t really have room for an actual closet, so my original plan was to add IKEA wardrobes along one wall of the bedroom.

I mean, that’s it. In that new addition, that would have been my closet — about 15 feet of IKEA Pax wardrobes lined up on one wall. Looking at what I have now, and what I had originally planned, I can’t imagine this being my closet.

I eventually realized that it wasn’t a good idea to build a brand-new addition and not include an actual closet for the bedroom, so I tried to fit one in. But the only thing I could come up with was something like this, which would have resulted in two different closets, one smaller and one much larger, that were about seven feet wide and created a kind of hallway leading from the bedroom into the bathroom.

It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t love it. And I especially didn’t like the idea of having two separate closets. Presumably, I would use one for shoes, handbags, and other accessories, and the bigger one for clothes.

I even tried this strange idea of building a closet off to the side, but it still would have been only seven feet wide.

When our home gym flooring disaster struck, I remember feeling so defeated. My attitude was horrible for a while, and I knew that my plans and dreams for our addition would be pushed back yet again. And then, in frustration and defeat, I decided that we needed to just change our plans so that we could have a proper bedroom sooner than later. And that’s when we decided to turn what was our home gym into our bedroom. The disappointment didn’t last long. It was pretty quickly replaced with excitement, but then I had to figure out the closet situation again. And that’s when I decided to turn the guest bedroom into a closet. But originally, I had planned on it being a home gym/closet combination.

And even after I decided to make it a laundry room/closet combination instead, I went through months of frustrating planning, changing of plans, etc. I had originally planned on using half of the room as a laundry room and the other half as a closet.

And then at some point, I changed the way I wanted the room divided, and planned to put up a wall with a door to separate the front part of the room, which would be the closet, from the back part of the room, which would be the laundry room.

So about two weeks ago, I posted this picture, and asked, “Who did it better, me or ChatGPT?” with an explanation that the top is how I actually decorated our living room, and the bottom is how ChatGPT “decorated” my living room.

Most people preferred mine. A few preferred the ChatGPT version. A couple of people didn’t like either one. No big deal. It was just a fun, meaningless post.

But one comment caught my attention because the woman said she didn’t like my version of the living room because it wasn’t “cohesive”. I thought, wait. You can say a lot of things about my house. I get that my colors aren’t for everyone. I tend towards colors that most people would be afraid of in their homes (or so I thought), and I get that. But, not cohesive? I definitely think the colors in our house are cohesive. I’ve worked really hard to make them cohesive.

And then I realized that she was seeing (for the first time) one picture of one room from one angle, and that’s it. She probably just randomly happened upon that post in her Facebook feed and has never seen any other part of our house. That one photo is all she’s ever seen. And from that angle, you can’t really see the details of that room that I think make it cohesive.

So I put together another post, and this time I included 17 pictures of various rooms in our home. The post looks like this on a Facebook feed, and of course on Facebook, you can click on a picture and then click through all 17 pictures to see them much larger.

The point of the post wasn’t that everyone MUST love my hous I really do understand that many people wouldn’t want these colors in their home. People aren’t required to like my house.

The main thing that shocked me about the response to that post was that the comments are overwhelmingly positive. I’d say about 99.9% of the comments were people expressing their love of what I had done in our home. That genuinely shocked me. I mean, we have lived through a decade of neutral farmhouse style dominating every medium imaginable, from TV to Instagram to magazines and more. I expected the response to our house to be at least 50/50 likes and dislikes. But that was not the case at all.

I was also very shocked that the overwhelming majority of comments were from people who liked my specific color palette that I used in our house. I mean, it’s one thing to like color in general, but it’s something altogether different to like the very specific color palette that I’ve used in our house. Again, I genuinely never would have expected it to appeal to such a large swath of people.

But do you know what that tells me? I think that people are color starved. And it’s obvious from reading through all of those comments. People are literally color starved. We’ve had all of these neutral interiors shoved at us for so long now, combined with the fact that so many people are simply afraid of adding color to their homes in fear of messing up, or ending up with a clown house, or fearing what a future buying might think, or dreading a day long in the future when they might have to actually repaint something, that they’ve just surrounded themselves with neutrals.

Some people genuinely love a neutral surrounding, and I totally get that. I do not doubt for one second that there are actually people who need completely neutral surroundings in their home. And I definitely understand that there are people who can appreciate photos of a home from a color lover like me, but who would feel nothing but anxiety all day every day if they actually had to live in my home. We’re all different. We’re all wired differently. Those different personalities and different temperaments require different surroundings to make us feel calm, peaceful, safe, and relaxed.

But I am 100% convinced that there are way too many people out there who have convinced themselves that they are “neutral” people when they’re not. For those people, that decision to surround themselves with nothing but neutral colors isn’t driven by a genuine internal need for calmness. It’s driven by fear. And that makes me sad.

Color is life, y’all! That’s why nature is FILLED with it! And when you bring color into your home, you breathe life into it. It doesn’t have to be flooded with color like my home is. And you certainly don’t have to decorate with the colors I’ve chosen. The colors I’ve used speak to me. Those colors that speak to me may be repellant to you. But I remain convinced that, with very few exceptions (and I do realize there are exceptions), most people have actual non-neutral colors that speak to them. Colors that they see, and that make them feel like they just want to drink it in. Those colors that make you feel that way should fill your home. Those are the colors you should be surrounding yourself with. Those are the colors that you should come home to at the end of a long day at work. Those are the colors that should fill that sanctuary called “home” — that respite that we all need from a crazy and chaotic world outside of those protective walls.

Decorating your home is about so much more than just filling it with the latest trends and the latest “color of the year.” That’s no way to decorate a home. While the whole neutral farmhouse trend was raging on for the last decade, I’ve been over here in my own home doing my own thing. And regardless of trends, regardless of what colors are deemed “popular” from one year to the next, I’ve ignored all of that, and I’ve created a home that makes me want to breathe it in every time I walk through the door.

I wish everyone had that. I want that for everyone. But that takes courage, and it requires putting away that fear. Find those colors that do that for you and fill your home with those. I promise you, it’s more than just decorating. It’s more than just making things pretty. It goes far beyond that in ways that probably even the most brilliant scientists, brain specialists, or psychologists can’t even fully explain. But just trust me on this. Do it, and you’ll see for yourself just how quality-of-life-changing it can be.

It starts with finding your colors. Not my colors. Not the “color of the year” from Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams. Not the colors that Southern Living or Architectural Digest tell you are the “it” colors for the year. But your colors. That color you’ve been drawn to all of your life. That color that you see, and you just want more of it. That color that makes you want to drink it in. That’s your color. Find it, go with it, and fill your home with it. Don’t worry about what others think about it. They don’t live there. Your home is for you.