So, You Always Wanted a Cleaning Service?

Some people will think I have no right to complain -- these are the people who do not have the luxury of a cleaning service, who either devote a great deal of time to cleaning their own homes, or who have simply resigned themselves to lower standards of cleanliness than what they would like.

I know that I'm very fortunate to have a team of professional housecleaners swoop in every two weeks for a thorough top-to-bottom clean.  I have only enjoyed this perk for the last several years, since my business took off to where house cleaning had become something that either didn't get done at all, or that took up ALL of my virtually-nonexistant free time.  I know what it's like to look around a filthy house, seeing dust, grime, and cobwebs everywhere and knowing that I would probably never get to it all because I had to prioritize the bathrooms and kitchens, and there was never more time once those areas were spic and span. 

Diane Keaton in Baby Boom

So, in the beginning, I alternated wildly between tearful gratitude that the cleaning people were coming and a horrible guilt that I wasn't able to "do it all" like the supermom movies of the '80s promised we could.  Diane Keaton managed to take care of a baby, a home, and launch a multi-million dollar baby food corporation in the movie Baby Boom, and I didn't see a maid service or anyone else helping her.

For me, the cleaning service is about the eternal balance between time and money.  When I had more time on my hands than money in the bank, I was cleaning my own home as best as I could.  When finances permit but time has grown scarce, a cleaning service enables me to give my client's projects the time and attention they deserve, and still have time left over to supervise homework and play dates, read to my kids at night, and occasionally even spend time with my husband.  So yes, I know I'm lucky to have a cleaning service, but still...

I have to tell you that, the day the cleaning service is coming, I have to do a bit of straightening up in preparation for their arrival.  They're coming to clean, not to neaten and organize, so it usually takes me a good hour to get rid of piles of mail and clear off surfaces, lay out clean sheets in all the bedrooms, set out the cleaning products I want them to use on my granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and hardwood floors.  My husband will sometimes help with this, but then I have to listen to him complain, "Why do I have to clean the house and pay a cleaning service to do it?"  Because in his mind, if you put the junk mail in the recycle bin and pick up the toys, the house is clean.  Vacuum cleaners, disinfectants, and other cleaning products are all superfluous.  Whatever.

So today, it's cleaning day.  Because my cleaning service usually arrives around 11:30 AM, I talked my husband into bathing our dogs in the tub and hosing all the mud off of the inside of our screen porch first thing in the morning, before the cleaners even got here, so the dogs wouldn't track all that mud into our nice, clean house.  After bathing the dogs and hosing down the outdoor area rug in my screen porch with a bleach/water solution, my darling husband heroically decided to address the mud at the root of the problem -- the areas near the back door where grass never seems to have been planted.  It's a shady area, and although he tried seeding there a few weeks ago, it's constantly muddy from the rain and sprinklers and the dogs are running and skidding in it -- that seed doesn't have a chance at germinating. 

So, minutes before the cleaning service arrived, my husband headed out for the first of several trips to Lowe's to purchase strips of sod.  While the cleaning service was working on my second and third floors, I was working in my first floor office and my husband was loading, unloading, and rolling out heavy sod out in the mud and muck.  Sweaty, tired, immersed in yard work -- are you getting a good visual?  And remember, before starting the sod project, he had already bathed two uncooperative, pony-sized Rottweiler puppies in the bathtub and hosed down a muddy screen porch. 

At my husband's request, I had made a point of asking the "team leader" of my cleaning crew to be sure and dust the ceiling fans in my kitchen, which were filthy with dust after having been forgotten several weeks in a row.  When they came to dust and vacuum my office, I went upstairs to my sewing studio, thinking how nice it was that I could cut out a couple of blocks for Lars's quilt while my office was being cleaned.  But alas, no sooner had I turned on the lights and picked up my rotary cutter than the head cleaning lady came rushing down the hallway insisting that I'd "better come quick!"

My ceiling fan, the one in the vaulted ceiling above my kitchen island, was completely unscrewed from the motor and dangling precariously about 14' above my granite countertops with nothing at all holding it but electrical wire.  My eyes nearly bugged out of my head.  If that wire broke and the ceiling fan came crashing down on my countertops and sink, it could easily cause $20,000 worth of damage in the blink of an eye.  What was even more infuriating was that the cleaners claimed they "just barely touched it" with their dusting pole when it suddenly broke free from the ceiling, that it "must not have been screwed in all the way."  I lunged for the phone and called Bernie, who was loading up more sod at Lowe's, and he came racing home to switch gears from landscaper to electrician. 

This is the third time we have had problems with this cleaning service and hanging light fixtures.  Since we both work from home, my husband actually caught one of the cleaners lazily spinning my kitchen chandelier to dust it instead of walking around the table, and he warned them that the fixture would eventually unscrew if they continued to do it.  They promised not to spin the chandelier anymore.  But then my dining room chandelier, which is oblong (oval) instead of round, was hanging diagonally one day after the cleaners left instead of being lined up with the dining room table.  Obviously someone was spinning or twisting the chandelier while dusting it, which was annoying since we had already asked them not to do this, but when I called them about it they insisted that "it must not have been screwed in tightly enough."  Can I just tell you that my husband has personally replaced every single light fixture in this house, and there is no way that  he would only partially screw in a ceiling fixture.  It's not like we had hired some shady handyman electrician who just wanted to get paid and get out.  Plus my husband had caught them red handed, so to speak, spinning the kitchen chandelier just a few weeks earlier.  And now the Casablanca ceiling fan in my kitchen, which has a good 3" of threading that screws the fan into the motor housing, is mysteriously barely screwed in as well?  There's no doubt in my mind that, when they did remember to dust it, they were rotating the entire fixture from the stair landing, in the same direction each time, until finally today they knocked it completely loose.

So, those of you who wish you had the luxury of a cleaning service for your home, let me tell you how the rest of our day went.  My husband spent the entire afternoon reinstalling the ceiling fan, dropping dust, lint, and filth all over my countertops, stovetop, kitchen sink, and floor, cussing and complaining (justifiably) the entire time.  The cleaning service had offered to come back after their lunch break to finish mopping beneath the ceiling fan, since my husband's ladder had been in the way when they left, but when they called a few hours later he was still struggling with it.  By the time the ceiling fan was back where it belonged, it was time for Bernie to pick up the kids from school.  I spent the next hour and a half re-cleaning my stove, countertops, sink, and floors.  If you hate cleaning your house now, imagine how you'd feel about writing someone else a big check for cleaning your house and then having to spend the rest of your afternoon cleaning up the mess they left in your home.  What on earth would I have done if Bernie had been out of town when this happened?  Could I even have gotten an electrician to come out fast enough to save my countertops from a meteoric ceiling fan crash episode?

Here's the deal with my cleaning service, and unfortunately, I hear the same thing from other people about their experiences with residential cleaning services.  The first time they come out, they are gung-ho and they leave your home spotless and gleaming, but it tapers off after that and they start skipping more and more, spending less and less time cleaning your home, making you feel like you have to go around behind them inspecting in order to get what you're paying for -- and if you had time to do that, you might as well just clean your house yourself.

Before they left today, I did have to remind them to vacuum my sewing studio, but I didn't notice until hours later that my laundry sink is still all dusty -- it's obvious no one touched it.  This matters because, when I hired the cleaning service, the owner of the company walked through my home with me and we discussed all of the areas I wanted clean and what my expectations were -- and they calculated how much they were going to charge me based on my high expectations which are not being met.  I'm paying for my studio, laundry room, walk-in closets and pantry all to be dusted and vacuumed or mopped, whether they remember to do it each week or not.  And it's not like I couldn't think of anything better to spend the money on, either, with Stewardship Week going on at church, the capital fundraising going on at the kids' school, and the dreary college fund investment reports making me feel like I should just bury money in a coffee can instead of trying to invest.  Ugh. 

What do you think, Internet Friends?  Do you have a cleaning service, and if so, is yours working out better than mine?  I am really shaken by the incident today.  Someone could have been badly injured, my gorgeous granite countertops that I've had less than a year could have been destroyed, and my kitchen could have been demolished just five weeks before I'm scheduled to host my husband's entire family for Thanksgiving dinner.  I feel like I need to interview some other cleaning companies, but we've had other services in the past and they routinely broke things like secondary bath shower fixtures, vanity lights, and a stove burner, to name the oopses that come immediately to mind.  Is this just something I need to expect and deal with when I hire a cleaning service, or are there better companies out there? 

Rebecca and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

I don't believe in horoscopes -- but if I did, I'll bet mine would have said "Do not get out of bed!  Not even to pee!  Hide under the covers and bide your time until this lousy day has passed!" 

I know what you're thinking, especially those of you who are parents.  "Every day is a gift from God, each day is a blessing."  "We can't control the things that happen to us, only the way we react -- nothing has to ruin your day unless you allow it to."  I could go on and on -- we moms have a million different ways of expressing this sentiment, and on most days I actually believe all of this Positive Attitude stuff.  Not today.

It all began shortly after 7:30 when I was almost home from my morning walk with the dogs.  Our hard work with training is paying off, and they are amazingly good loose leash walkers 90% of the time, constantly "checking in" with me, sitting at every curb and waiting until I give them permission to proceed, etc.  I am SO proud of how well they both behave when I walk them together on the tandem lead.  The only area we still need improvement on is that they go a little nuts when they see certain other dogs.  You know, they get all excited, pulling and straining and hopping up and down, like some grown women I know might do if they saw someone like, oh, Bono from U2 strolling down the opposite sidewalk, naked...  ;-)  It's not every dog, not all the time, and not always the dogs you would expect.  For instance, there is this one little Yorkie dog who looks deceptively innocent and sweet to us humans, even while projecting silent doggy insults and blasphemy toward other dogs.  The Yorkie pulls and strains on his leash, too -- very Scrappy Doo, "Lemmee at'em!"  However, the Yorkie probably weighs a couple of ounces, so his owner just smiles and waves and makes no attempt to get her dog to behave.  Whereas Otto and Lulu each probably weigh a good sixty pounds by now, and I have to dig in my heels and lean backward if the two of them start lunging and pulling and going nuts.  I've been working on getting my dogs to sit and obey some commands for treats while other dogs walk by, to keep their focus on me and condition them to ignore the other dogs we see.  They had been getting better and better at this, until today.  I'm telling you, something is UP with this particular Yorkie!  We passed him twice on our walk this morning, and the first time my distractions worked and Otto and Lulu behaved liked the amazing, obedient superpups I know and love.  I admit it; I was feeling smug.  Pride cometh before the fall...  So, when we were headed back down our street and I saw the same Yorkie and his human strolling down to our cul-de-sac ahead of us, sauntering toward my own house, I weighed my options.  There wasn't another way I could go to get home, and the Yorkie was going to pass us on the way back no matter what because the cul-de-sac is a dead-end.  I had get home to wake up the boys and get them ready for camp, and it was getting late.  I gave the Yorkie what I thought was enough of a head start, and led my dogs back towards my house.  Well, when we passed the Yorkie, who was headed back out of the cul-de-sac on the opposite side of the street from us by now, my pups went cuckoo crazy, I lost my balance and pitched forward and got pulled A COUPLE OF INCHES into the road.  That's a really important detail -- my dogs stopped pulling as soon as they realized I had fallen; they did NOT drag me across the street, and if they were wild and uncontrollable and just took off, I would have been hurt much worse.  As it was, I skinned both knees and scraped my right arm pretty badly because I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and I crash-landed at the curb.  Mostly I just hurt my pride and felt foolish.  The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day had begun.
After bandaging my knees and elbow and taking the boys to camp, I returned home to meet the Stanley Steemer crew that I'd scheduled to clean the master bedroom carpet as well as the upstairs hall and both staircases.  The carpets weren't really dirty, per se; I knew there had been some coffee dribbles on the stairs and in the hall and there was one puppy accident in the master bedroom.  I let the carpet cleaner guy talk me into also having him clean a large wool area rug in my kitchen as well as the wall-to-wall wool carpeting in my formal living room.  Oh, and he suggested adding deodorizing as well, "since I have pets."  [NOTE: If I was technically savvy, I'd rig this blog post so that Chopin's Funeral March started to play when you got to this part of my day.]

They started with the wool living room carpet.  I went upstairs to make beds and straighten up.  When I came downstairs, I immediately smelled a nasty odor that reminded me of the rank, stinking Diaper Genie we used to have in the nursery when the boys were babies.  I mentioned this to the carpet cleaner dude, and he reassured me that this was the normal smell of wet wool, nothing to worry about, it will go away when it dries.  And I know that wet wool has a certain funky smell, but my olfactory memory was fuzzy and although my brain was taking me straight back to the Diaper Genie era, I was not positive at this point that it wasn't just wet wool that I was smelling.  I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt, and went into my office and attempted to work.  The stench intensified, and blossomed like an evil perfume with notes of mildew, sour milk, and Johnson & Johnson's Baby Powder.  I stepped outside to the mailbox, and when I came back in the house I was overpowered by the sensation that I had entered a wet basement full of moldy upholstery, forgotten sweaty athletic socks, and a broken sump pump.  And still that sicky-sweet, brain-squishing, cloyingly overpowering stench of baby powder sticking to my lungs with every breath.  Well, by this time they're done cleaning, and I object again -- with urgency! -- about the smell.  That's when Carpet Cleaner Guy goes into his quasi-scientific spiel about how the cleaning process "activates bacteria when it's wet" and this creates the unpleasant odor that will go away when the carpet dries.  He tells me that the deodorizer he used contains a baby powder fragrance to "help with the smell from the bacteria" -- AFTER he's pumped this deodorizer all over the house, he tells me about the fragrance!  And, on top of that, he proudly tells me that HE MIXED THE DEODORIZER/PERFUME IN AN EXTRA STRENGTH CONCENTRATION for my home since he knows some people don't like the smell of wool carpets when they are cleaned.  As Charlie Brown would say, "AAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGHH!!!!"  My eyes bulged out of my head, steam came out of my nostrils and ears, and my reddened face began to spin wildly like that girl in The Exorcist.  I am very sensitive to fragrances, and there is NO WAY I would have agreed to the deodorizer if I knew it was basically a baby powder fragrance that just masks other odors temporarily.  I was livid, but what was done was done, I had kids to pick up from camp, and the dude who thinks he can scare me with big words like "bacteria" claimed the stink would dissipate in a couple of hours, anyway.

I picked up my kids, and took them to my parents' house to go swimming with their cousins while I finished up some work in my office.  Alas, when I walked into my house, the stench hit me like a ton of football players slamming into the other guy who has the ball (I'm branching out into sports metaphors; do you like it?).  Dissipate, my ass!  I stormed around, which didn't help.  I lit some Bamboo Teakwood scented candles, which also didn't help, so I blew them out.  I went upstairs and was horrified to see that the wall-to-wall carpeting in the hallway and master bedroom was all stretched out and wrinkled like a belly that just had a baby, with several bulges and wrinkles big enough to trip over.  If I was any angrier, my head would have exploded.  I staggered downstairs to in search of emergency chocolate and to pet my dogs, and then once my blood pressure came down somewhat, I called the manager of the Stanley Steemer franchise.  I told him how my carpet, which is only a few years old and looked -- and smelled! -- pristine and lovely yesterday, is now stretched out, stinky, and foul; that my once-lovely home now smells as though it was a recently flooded daycare centere awash with sewage, and how profoundly unhappy I am about all of these developments.  This gentleman informed me that they use the baby powder fragrance because it doesn't bother anyone (??!!!), that the smell should go away in a few days, and since there was nothing else he could do about it now, he didn't feel like talking to me anymore.  Have I entered some parallel universe today?! 

So now I'm going to have to hire someone else to clean these carpets again, to get rid of the Eau de Baby Powder et Mildew Poo fragrance that apparently offends no one besides me, and then I'm going to have to pay someone else to restretch the carpeting and get rid of the crazy wavy mountain range wrinkles all over my bedroom floor.  There is slight consolation in the fact that I paid Stanley Steemer with my American Express card, however.  I have already initiated a charge dispute on the grounds that the carpets are dirtier than they were prior to the cleaning, they stink to all hell, and they are stretched out and damaged, requiring repairs.  I love the nice people at American Express!  Still, what a headache!  Who has time for this?!

You might be thinking, "Wow, what a lousy day Rebecca has had!  Surely this is enough misfortune, heartache, and house wreckage for one day!"  But you would be wrong. 

The setting: Bed time, Anders' bedroom.  Two little boys, one good book (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians) and one tired, worn-out Mommy who just wants to enjoy story time with her kids and put an end to this ill-fated day.  Enter two puppy dogs who spent more time than usual in their crates this afternoon, who want nothing more than to play World Wide Wrestling and Bark Like Crazy If You Want My Chew Toy.  It took me a good 10-15 minutes to get them quieted down and settled in with appropriate bones to gnaw on quietly so the boys could hear me reading, and then we got engrossed in our story.  It's suspenseful, zany, and unexpected -- just what I needed to take my mind off the day behind me and enjoy special time with Anders and Lars.  My narrative was accompanied by the reassuring hum of the air conditioning and the soothing, rhythmic scraping sound of puppy dog teeth against dog bones.  Except that it turned out not to have been dog bones, but the wooden leg of Anders' Pottery Barn desk chair that they were chewing.  It was pretty badly damaged by the time I discovered this treachery, and the dogs looked up at me like, "Hi, Mommy, aren't we good dogs to chew the chair so quietly without fighting so you could read?" 

In the famous words of Marie Antoinette, shortly before the revolutionaries chopped off her head: "Mes pauvres enfants, mes yeux n'ont plus delarmes pour pleurer pour vous.  Adieu!"  That is, "My poor children, my eyes have no more tears to cry for you.  Adios!"  I might add, my throat has no more screams to scream for my poor chair, for my carpet, for my knees and elbows that make me look like a child just learning to ride a bicycle (except for being old and everything).  It is time to climb into the safe haven of my bed, hide under the covers, and think happy thoughts until sleep comes to wash the day away and bring me a shiny new tomorrow so I can start all over again.

But first, optimist that I am, I have to take a peek at the slender upside to this Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day:

1. My loved ones are safe and healthy.  Nothing bad happened today to those who carry pieces of my heart around with them wherever they go.
2. Other than my scrapes and bruises, I didn't get hurt today.  Considering how hyped up they were about that Yorkie, my furbabies showed amazing self control and obedience by immediately stopping pulling when I fell.  I suffered no car wrecks or heart attacks; I didn't get eaten by hyenas or infected with Anthrax or anything horrible like that.
3. Carpets can be cleaned and stretched; it's an inconvenience, but not the end of the world.  I'm lucky to live in a nice home that has carpets and blankets to hide beneath at the end of a difficult day.
4. My puppies, my little boys, my husband, and my parents were all wonderful to me today.  I even had dinner with my two Chicago nephews who are visiting for a week, which was another bright spot in an otherwise gloomy day.
5. Pottery Barn, Schmottery Barn.  That chair spins on a swivel base; I can just turn the damaged leg to the inside of the desk and no one will see it.  Who are we kidding -- with so many toys, Pokemon cards, and chaos in that boy's bedroom, no one is EVER going to notice the chewed up desk chair leg unless I point it out.  And if they had to chew a chair leg, that one belonged to what is probably the least expensive chair in my entire house.
6. There are only four minutes left of today, and then tomorrow is coming, all fresh and new and empty like a blank blog post that can be anything I want it to be.  It's going to be a great day!

Spilling the Dirt on Earthy-Crunchy Laundry Powder

Okay, I'm not your average tree hugger.  You should know that up front.  Oh sure, I care about the environment as much as the next girl.  I saw that Wall-E movie about how humanity might have to evacuate the Earth if we turn it into a giant garbage dump, entirely devoid of life, and I don't want that kind of future for my children or my grandchildren.  While searching the internet for a nice still shot of Earth-as-garbage-dump from the Wall-E film, I was horrified to find images of parts of the world that already look like the Wall-E film, in real life.


Garbage City, a real place outside of Cairo in Egypt, as photographed by Bas Princen

But until fairly recently there has been a separate subculture associated with "going green," the legacy of the hippie tree-huggers or whatever, and I have not been a member of that group.  I would hesitantly venture into the local Earth Fare organic supermarket from time to time, and find an alternate universe populated by women wearing biblical sandals with socks, carrying hemp diaper-clad babies in handmade, hand-dyed slings, and they have all brought their own reusable fabric grocery totes made out of organic fabric that was handwoven by a collective of indigenous lepers somewhere, with all proceeds donated to saving the rainforest...  Okay, I totally made up that part about the lepers, but you get the idea.  I felt very conspicuous at Earth Fare, self-conscious about my leather purse, my frivolous attire, and my ignorance of the complexities of natural foods, vegetarianism, cruelty-free cosmetics, and environmentally-friendly cleaning products. 

I couldn't even find half of the groceries on my list, and the things I did find seemed outrageously overpriced.  Take laundry detergent, for instance.  I pay $5.99 for a box of Arm & Hammer fragrance-free powdered laundry detergent at the regular grocery store, but there was no Arm & Hammer detergent, or any other recognizable brand, to be found at Earth Fare.  Instead, similarly-sized boxes of laundry powder with brand names I'd never heard of cost as much as $14.99.

Well, in a desperate time crunch, with no laundry soap at home, no clean clothes to wear, and no time to get to a "normal" store to buy laundry detergent any time soon, I broke down and bitterly forked over $14.99 for a box of Biokleen Premium Plus Laundry Powder.  The outside of the box claimed that I would get 54 loads as opposed to the 46 loads I supposedly got from a box of Arm & Hammer.  The box also informed me that it contained no phosphates, no chlorine bleach, and no "fillers."  I have no idea what phosphates and fillers are, and at this point I thought the "no chlorine bleach" part just indicated that this laundry product was safe to use on dark colored loads.  I just hoped this weird stuff would actually get the clothes clean and I wouldn't end up throwing out the whole box.

I got the box home, opened it, and was shocked to find what looked like an instant lemonade mix scoop inside instead of the regular-sized scoop I was used to.  Look at the two side-by-side:

 I was incredibly skeptical about this laundry powder, but after using this product for about a month, I'm a convert.  My clothes are coming out just as clean, and I'm using between 1/4 to 1/5 of the amount of laundry soap that I was using before, so this "expensive" environmentally-friendly laundry product is actually much less expensive than the Arm & Hammer brand, or Tide, or Cheer, or any of the other mainstream detergents.  It turns out that the claim of 46 loads on the Arm & Hammer box is based on small loads, for which you're only supposed to fill the big green scoop to the first line.  Of course they give you the mammoth scoop because they want to encourage people to use more soap so they have to buy more faster.  The Biokleen claim of 54 regular loads or 108 high efficiency (front-loading washer) loads is based on filling their scoop all the way to the top for a full sized load in a conventional washing machine, or halfway up for the HE washing machines. 

I still haven't had a chance to figure out what phosphates are and why they are bad for the environment, or why chlorine bleach has become an enemy of the planet, but I definitely get that when one box lasts four or five times as long, there is less packaging, less waste headed to landfills, and less pollution transporting that product to market.  I would also like to point that, now that I am saving money by switching to environmentally-friendly laundry powder, I have freed up additional grocery funds which can now be allocated towards my favorite guilty Earth Fare splurge: a little $8 block of Ski Queen Gjetost, a caramelized brown Norwegian goat cheese that no one in my family eats except me.  I make little cracker sandwiches with whole grain Wheat Thins when I don't have time for a real lunch.  Mmm...  



   

...So, Perfectionism: Is it a Good Thing?

You may be wondering why I felt compelled to extoll the virtues of perfectionism earlier.  Even if you weren't wondering, I'm going to tell you anyway.  Remember my post about our stay at The Sanctuary resort on Kiawah Island a couple of weeks ago?  Well, what I didn't tell you is that I made them move us to another room after the first night because I noticed splatter marks on the walls around the toilet in the first room.  Gross, right?  Vomit, or... I don't even want to think about what else it could have been!  Soon after moving into the second hotel room, I was grossed out by the discovery of black mold between the marble tiles of the shower stall, and we asked the front desk to have it cleaned.  The black mold remained throughout our stay, as did a dirty tissue from a previous guest out on the balcony.  Now, does this tell you more about the hotel, or more about me?  Are my standards just too high?

One thing I can assure you of is that perfectionism comes in handy in the field of high-end design.  As I was reminded on my vacation, it does not feel good to be paying a lot of money for something and then have to complain about everything in order to get things done right.  That's why I finally looked the other way where the mold and dirty Kleenex were concerned -- I resigned myself to the fact that, no matter how much money I paid, no matter which room they put me in, the room would probably not be cleaned to my standards, and it's not like there was another 5-star hotel on the island that I could move to.  I had to make the best of things, but my memories of the trip are soured by the fact that I paid through the nose to stay in a dirty hotel room.  In my work, I obsess about the details in hopes that my clients will love everything the first time, without having to point out flaws and without having to feel bad about complaining in order to get what they want.

Remember the discontinued embroidered silk fabric that I'm having recreated by a custom embroiderer for my client who was the victim of a house fire?  I got a sample of the custom embroidery today, and I spent the better part of an hour agonizing over every little detail.  There it is, on the left in this photo, with a sample of the original fabric on the right.  Isn't it gorgeous?  The thread color definitely needs to be a darker shade of brown, but as I examined the samples side-by-side, and viewed the embroidery file in my computer software program, I found several nit-picky, minute revisions to request.  This fabric is going to be used for ceiling mounted swags that are going to be seen from across the room; no one is going to get this close to the embroidery once the window treatments are installed anyway.  Yet my client is investing a lot of money in these draperies, trusting me to deliver a couture quality product that begs to be admired up close.  There's no such thing as a perfect design, a perfect drapery, or even a perfect fabric, but the goal is always to leave as little room for improvement as possible. 

I have a feeling that my very talented digitizer, who does beautiful work that I am absolutely awestruck by, is probably whipping up a little Rebecca voodoo doll right about now after receiving my feedback on his design work.  Soon I am going to be experiencing mysterious, sharp pains inflicted by stick pins far, far away...  Still, I'd rather spend more time and energy getting the design right at this stage than have 16 yards of silk custom-embroidered and sewn into window treatments, only for my client to be disappointed by the quality on installation day.  Perfectionism: It's A Good Thing!