Thoughts about Things

Sarah and I love this world that we have created. This labor of love, the Estate of Things.

Today, I’m writing about that to remind you and myself!

We have invented and reinvented, innovated and then reinvented again. This blog was our beginning and I believe it will always be the backdrop to whatever TEOT is to us at any point in time.

It’s more than a labor of love, it’s a part of our identity.

It’s a symbol of our friendship, it’s the love child of the connection that we have shared over our passion for home decor since we were roommates in college.

Recently on the phone, we were reminiscing about our college apartment. No one had a space like ours at that time in our world. It was filled with art, framed vintage records, that incredible thrift store score of a sofa and the custom shelves that Sarah had her Dad make that is now the SALE section shelving at SHOP TEOT in Southern Pines. How truly sweet is that? I bet that if you dig deep enough in a storage box in NC, I still have our sheer linen colorblocked curtains in shades of 70s rust and sage, to match the vintage striped sofa.

Sarah and I were bitten by the same bug that our college landlord was bitten by. Ah, Mr. Bediz. He collected historic homes on our street, buying up one after another on auction or out of foreclosure. He had a notion that he would renovate each one into multi-unit student housing and he outfitted the kitchens tastefully with marble slabs that he negotiated out of the same city buildings where he had to petition for permits. He was a Turkish immigrant, an artist, a hippie that had traveled the country living out of his VW van with his new American hippie bride in the Sixties. I might be getting too deep into storytelling, but many of the crew that Mr. Bediz hired to help him build out his dream neighborhood were, like him, immigrants. Most we assumed were of the illegal variety. Mr Bediz provided these guys with work, cash pay and he also allowed his crew to live in the unfinished housing while it was being built. Thinking back on it nowadays, it was quite the risky operation that we were witness to. He always skirting the law and ready to battle it out downtown if need be. A true bohemian. I think it got the better of him before all of his houses made it to completion and were successfully rented out. But we got to live in one and it was a beautiful apartment.

Since those days Sarah and I have seen each other through a number of homes and living scenarios, real estate pursuits, investments, dreams and obsessions over our own pursuits to make a livelihood out of this passion we share.

After college, Sarah moved back to her hometown and ultimately settled in Southern Pines. She has lived in six homes that I can think to count, updating or fully renovating each one along the way. Her current home was purchased with the dream of a huge renovation and that itch is itching to be scratched. She wants to do right by that home and if anyone can, it’s her.

Sarah is no stranger to a historic renovation in Southern Pines, having put her stamp on more than a handful of homes leading up to this one and a number of other full gut renovations, flips or multi-family rentals through her family company Beaver Path.

I purchased my first home as a 28 year old single lady in my hometown, Hickory, NC. I was living that work from home life in the California tech startup world back in 2008. Since that foray I found myself back out in LA, married up and am living my own personal renovation dreams through our primary home and a weekend getaway in the nearby San Bernardino Mountains.

I’m telling you all of this because I love storytelling and frankly I hope you are new here and don’t know our backstory, despite the fact that this blog still contains posts from the beginning of our blogger days way back in 2008 when Sarah and I first hatched this dream together.

Recently in life, (besides COVID which has been profound for all of us in terms of measuring where we are in life and what is important about home) I have been giving special attention to what matters most.

I spent the month of August journaling about Passions. Identifying and reliving into a list of “strong reasons to live” as suggested by the Radical Remission book I had read, part of my cancer journey and recommended reading by my integrative oncologist.

I made a great list and it was long, but one of the items on my list of reasons to live is to continue to see TEOT grow toward success alongside Sarah.

I’m coming out of chemotherapy for the second time (after last Fall’s first bout with this persistent disease) and I feel that familiar feeling of wanting to tackle everything I can, head on and fast, thrashing at what to do next and feeling so far behind for having been stuck in an incapable body for such a long time during treatment.

Sarah and I have an old dialog pattern where it’s easy to tell one another “you should just do this…”

While ultimately cheerleading one another, we do so with a certain amount of “come on, it’s easy, if I were in your boat it’d be done already.”

We talked about decision paralysis, which we both suffer from albeit in different ways. She thinks I have a great house that’s full of the same crap junked together like my college bedroom (which at least she did say was impressive to 99% of people that came through) and then I subsequently made fun of her for living with a sofa that she hates for more than 4 years while waiting to commit to the right one moving forward.

So what is next for us?

I don’t really know. I believe the blog has been neglected and poorly tended to because it takes a great deal of effort to build a great post and the feedback loop isn’t as rewarding as it once was so it’s just feels like a lot of hard work that isn’t worth the effort.

We started @theestateofthings on Instagram with the idea that we could satisfy the bloggy kickshare habit with quick inspiration images and a call out to the occasional progress pic on our various projects.

But that falls to the wayside too.

Meanwhile, our @shopteot instagram is banging. Sarah took over about a year ago when I became ill and she does such a fantastic job. The grid is beautiful all the time.

What an incredible thing to have the acumen to sell homes, renovate homes, design spaces, curate product offering, merchandise display shelves, design websites, build web content on multiple platforms, take beautiful photos of self-styled vignettes, create marketing graphics, caption beautiful photos that sell product, utilize 4-year-old branding that still feels relevant… on top of various other personal pursuits at home and among family.

I’ve been listening to the Athena Calderone podcast “More Than One Thing,” interviews with successful multi-hyphenates and boy does it make me feel like Sarah and I are in good company.

I’ll wrap this ramble post up by mentioning another valuable lesson I have to takeaway from my experience convalescing through cancer. To connect better with my spirituality, I read a book called “When Things Fall Apart” by a Buddhist Pema Chodron. She writes a practical guide for how to cope when things go awry in life as they are certain to do. Embrace the uncertainty, lean into the sharp points to learn more about oneself, and become a more self-aware and compassionate member of society. In the end, the book says that the path is the goal. It is simply to embrace a constant commitment to becoming better.

The path IS the goal here too.

I want to promise you more posts, better content that visually illustrates the good hard work that Sarah and I are each doing in our lives to hone the skills of our shared passion for home decor, real estate, renovation and interior design.

But I might fail myself if I make that promise and then more pressing matters of running the biz and making things happen takes over the will to post on WordPress.

So, the path is the goal. Just simply staying on the path that is The Estate of Things, having this blog here as the backdrop, the place to collect our ideas and inspirations when we have the bandwidth to collect and share them, the place where we build out our portfolio of projects, the archive of the decade plus of posts through the years as we have evolved.

A place for me to occasionally diatribe about it, collect the images of our accomplishments and reflect on how far we have come in our shared passion and in our friendship through this labor of love.

I love you Sarah.