You know you’re a nerd when you see the license plate of the car driving in front of you starting with the letters ST and you immediately know it’s a Hitachi manufactured hard disk drive..
This happened to me yesterday as we, the admin staff at my work, were driving to a colleague’s home to have a meal. It took about ten seconds for my brain to catch up with the error!
When we got there we were brought around her "new" home to see the sights. But when you’ve been doing total renovation of your own home you only first see the faults of others’. Like the first thing I noticed was the shoddy finishing her carpenters had done on the baseboards. They were pre-painted and they hadn’t bothered to paint over the nails so both the floor and the ceiling were framed in white with hundreds of little black holes looking like termite holes from a distance. Not good.
And then my colleagues were raving about the windows. It was a lot of windows in the first floor and it was very nice, but the first thing that came to mind was: "Yeah, you couldn’t have done a better job of facilitating break-in and entry.." Especially true nowadays with the "villa-robbers" driving around Norway and the police just playing catch-and-release.
I had to use the bathroom to wee and ended up checking the way the vertical acrylic seams had been done in the corners. It wasn’t very bad but Lady C did a better job in our kitchen. And their home was pre-made, pre-bought and done by so-called professionals.
Sometimes the faults are more invisible, Feng-shui like problems. This is called the room layout, and though I’m no master at all, you can tell if there’s something wrong. If you have a large condo or penthouse but the room layout is wrong it will feel a lot smaller. Or usually you’ll feel that the room layout is messy. This will have an impact of how you live there and how content you are about it, without you explicitly knowing it. Our own flat has brilliant room layout, that the new 50m2 "family units" built in Norway today will never compete with. People aren’t getting smarter at building homes, just more economically efficient.
Lady C is experiencing the same thing, over and over again. Whenever we go into the home of someone we immediately survey the workmanship, for good and bad, and always find that our own home and work is better. Which is a very nice thing with regards to our self-esteem as DIY masters, but it’s only a question of time before someone throws us out for demeaning their home and castle. As a disclaimer then, we just can’t help it. When you’ve touched every surface of your home and everything underneath it your eyes adapt to immediate assessing of property. You may not be aware of this but your property probably sucks. Have a nice weekend!