How To Make the Right Decision (or not)

 

Demo on my kitchen had begun, and the clock was ticking. I had to make a decision about these darn tiles, and it it had to be the right one, because everybody knows that interior design is a TEST.  There are right and wrong answers. If you make the wrong decision, people will secretly take pictures of your house and pin them on their Pinterest board entitled “Design Fails” and you will get famous for failing so hard.  I did not want that to happen. So I did a lot of research, which is obviously the best way to do interior design.

I’m only joking…ish. I think one of the reasons redesigning a kitchen is rough for those who are decision averse is that the decisions being made are not small, inexpensive decisions. This is not like buying that pillow on the clearance aisle at Target that you may not like a year from now (or when you get home from the store). And it’s definitely not like picking a nail color at the salon  (which, as my friends can attest, takes me an embarrassingly long time). I’m talking about choosing floors that I actually have to pay people to INSTALL in my house, with like, tools and grout and stuff.

I spent a lot of time looking at tiles here , here, and  here. And occasionally, I had the fortune of stumbling upon one of these gems in person. 

I had to choose from the in-stock tiles on these websites, and while I really did love so many of them, I had little nagging doubts about every design. One felt too trendy. Another felt too ornate. The scale on another just didn’t seem right. If time is not a factor in your kitchen reno, you can actually custom design your tiles. This was not the case for me, though. I couldn’t allow my procrastination about this decision to hold up the whole renovation. I was starting to have flashbacks from my high school junior year Research Biology science project…and we all know how that turned out.  At one point, I thought I was nearing a decision, but when I put the tiles in the price estimator, I got a sinking feeling. Was the price doable? Yes. But did I have that “know that you know” for the price? I couldn’t say that I did.

After many hours spent with the black and white encaustic beauties, I bailed. I decided to go with good old white porcelain hexagon tiles. While part of me felt as though I was missing an opportunity for something funky and fresh, another part of me felt relieved.

While decisions can be challenging for me, I’m a huge fan of taking risks in design, as is evidenced by my very orange, very large, velvet living room sectional. But sometimes a particular risk just doesn’t sit right, and you don’t really know why. Maybe it wasn’t the tile that I was so drawn to in Jessica Helgerson’s kitchen, maybe it was that high contrast black and white overall color scheme, the open shelving, and the swaths of wood to warm it up. But I know what you’re thinking, “Can she  get the same dramatic feel without that gorgeous statement tile?”  These are the kinds of deep, soul-searching questions we will fearlessly face here together my friends. Be brave.

Also, I still have some bathrooms to renovate, so you know, those tiles and I just might have a future together.