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Wednesday, February 3, 2010

diy doubt and drainage

I spend 75% of my time thanking God for my DIY capabilities. And I spend the other 25% of my time doubting my DIY capabilities. Thankfully, the latter only lasts temporarily and it's usually induced by someone else critiquing me for trying to take on so much of the wedding myself.

This thought makes me wonder how many DIY projects I've added to my list since being engaged that I probably initially thought I would in no way, not in a million years, even if pigs flew be able to do myself. It's a really long list considering the fact that, for the first 3 months of our engagement, I thought I wouldn't be "allowed" to do anything myself. I guess I must have thought that the wedding industry would swoop in, carry our wedding away and not let me see it again for another year. I was so crazy.

Thankfully, I then found the online community of brides who were much more encouraging than the wedding industry and made me feel a lot more confident in my abilities. Since then, I've come to realize that I (and sometimes we) can do things that used to seem monumental like the bouquets (like this one from Design*Sponge), boutonnieres, centerpieces, and invitations.


Unfortunately, as confident as I usually am, I still doubt that I'll be able to execute these projects to perfection, but life lessons like the one I got from Mr. FP yesterday teach me that you don't always need perfection.

Our bathtub drain has been clogging bad for the past couple weeks, so Mr. FP took it upon himself to try to fix it with a bent coat hanger. I was busy working on a paper, so I didn't get to immediately see the results, but when I inquired later, he told me it went well. And then, a few seconds later (in his state of guilt) he confessed that while he was trying to remove the clog, a 7-inch piece of the coat hanger had broken off and lodged itself in our drain beyond his reach. And while our initial reaction was to think "oh crap, this is going to make the problem so much worse", it turns out that couldn't be farther from the truth. Apparently jamming a 7-inch piece of wire down the drain did it some good and now our drainage is like new. Perfection? No, far from it. But it works.

See? You don't need perfection to get results. And while I never expected to learn a wedding planning lesson from our apartment's drainage system, it seems to fit within the general theme of our wedding... 'it ain't always perfect, but it works for us'.

Has anyone else found their inner DIY bug since becoming a bride? Or has your drainage system taught you anything?


p.s.
prior to writing this post,
I asked Mr. FP: "is there was anything about our wedding that we're not DIY-ing?"
his response: "flowers".
my response: "but we are DIY-ing the flowers".
his response: "yeah, but you're not growing the flowers yourself".

apparently DIY has a whole different meaning to him...

3 comments:

Vee said...

BAHAHA what a great answer - you've caught yourself a witty one! Maybe you should grow the flowers yourself??? J/k :)

Ann Marie said...

i'm sure everything will turn out perfect! you have such wonderful taste!

Emily said...

If you're crafty, you can DIY for your wedding! Just remember to delegate all wedding day tasks to others who are not in your wedding party (that includes YOU!) We did lots ourselves, invitations, programs, candles, some decorations... but we also left a lot to the experts. I am crafty but there is an issue of time when the wedding day rolls around - you don't want to be stressed on your big day!

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