I approached the parlor bathroom with the purism of the novice.

This meant that I wanted ‘real’ everything, whatever the cost to sanity or budget. It’s a kind of aesthetic dedication that bleeds into all areas of my life and means that how it’s done is as important as the thing itself. OK, it’s mostly perfectionism.

So, yes, I wanted marble tiles. Little hexagonal mosaic tiles. Not the fancy marble, mind, but still marble. Let me remind you, in case you’ve forgotten: this is a very, very early project. Like, never laid a tile before in my life, never poured concrete, never laid underlayment, didn’t know what underlayment meant. Nothing.

I’m saving the blow by blow for the eventual memoir, but suffice it to say that pouring self-leveling concrete was quite literally the easiest step of this whole ordeal, and that took multiple mixes and the creation of clever dams to keep the sludge from sliding down the hall because the floor was quite sloped (duh.)

Where I really went wrong, though, was trying to lay the tile on the same day that the mega smoke alarm went off (just dust, not fire) and the FDNY trundled up to the door, summoned by the alarm monitoring company who apparently do this automatically if you have the misfortune of being the generally anxious sort of person who keeps their phone on do not disturb and misses the crucial ‘are you ok’ call.

By the time I was laying this tile, then, I’d waved bye-bye to the fire people and was absolutely vibrating with stress, and yet I somehow compelled myself to go on. Past self, why not a break? I’ll tell you why not: when you are young, and a woman, and you’ve just bought a house with all the money you have in the world, and somehow convinced everyone around you that you’re going to be able to pull this off, the desire to prove yourself is a burning furnace that could propel a rocket into space.

Of course, no rocket. Just tiles. They got stuck down, but not very straight or particularly level. Eventually one patch that I’d finished had to join up with another patch and they didn’t meet evenly so I had to cut a little seam and kind of knit them together. And look, it felt bad for a few days (months) as they glittered chaotically at me, but I had to move the eff on. Obviously I got a lot better at tiling, and planning, and all that snack that really is not complicated once you’ve done it a few times. I’d always really believed in learning, in theory at least, but now I have to live with the crooked evidence of a time when I truly knew basically nothing. Humbling and, eventually, funny.