I have a secret, and I am historically terrible at keeping secrets, so bear with me.
Our new Director of Construction at Kaage Homes starts this week, and I am not telling you his name yet, which is already more self-control than I usually show.
What I can tell you is that he has over 40 years of experience, which is longer than I have been reliably making decisions about anything, lunch included.
He has built multi-million-dollar homes on the lake.
His work has been featured in Architectural Digest, among many others.
And he has built homes for people you have heard of, people whose names would make you put your fork down at a dinner party, people I simply cannot name in this email, and I need you to understand the physical restraint it is taking to type that sentence.
If you ask me in real life, I may just spill the tea.
In writing, I am a vault.
A leaky, excitable vault.
Hiring someone more qualified than you is humbling in the best way.
You would assume the lesson from a career building houses for people with famous names and very large budgets is that money makes everything easy.
It doesn’t.
The houses that go well at that level go well for the same reason they go well at every level: somebody made the decisions early, and made them in order.
The houses that go sideways go sideways for the same reason too. Somebody didn’t decide, and the house decided for them. (You may remember I recently had a very similar but different lesson explained to me by a police officer in Winnetka - for those of you wondering my license is now renewed. God bless.)
A famous client with an unlimited budget who can’t choose a tile is still a person who can’t choose a tile. The only difference is the invoice.
Here is what the famous people have that the rest of us don't, and it isn't the money:
It's an office. A team of people whose entire job is to make them decide things in the right order, to tell them the tile can wait but the windows cannot, and to catch the $40,000 mistake while it is still a line on a drawing instead of a wall someone has to tear out.
The rest of us might have a Pinterest board, a contractor who returns calls on Thursdays, and a spouse whose opinions are exclusively about the refrigerator.
I know this because I do this for a living and yet I still haven't finished planning my own house. The cobbler's children have no shoes, and the designer has no mudroom.
So we built the office for everyone who doesn’t already have one on retainer.
The Design Office is seven weeks, live and online, with me, starting October 26.
It’s the exact process we run for our own clients, handed to you in the order we use it, with weekly Office Hours for the questions that come up once you start thinking this way.
You will not become a contractor.
You will become the most prepared client your contractor has ever had, and they will be quietly thrilled about it.
If you want to see what it’s like to learn from me before you decide, I recorded a free masterclass, and it goes out tomorrow.
But here’s the part that can’t wait: course enrollment opens tomorrow too, which means today is the last day to get on the waitlist.
The waitlist is the difference between $1,997 and $2,497, so you’ll save $500 simply by putting your name out there.
It’s my way of thanking you for reading all my long and weird stories all this time.
And if you’d rather just have the man with the famous clients build your house using our full-service designers, that part is easier. Call us.
Until next Sunday (wait, see my P.S.),
Xo,
Grace
P.S. Because I missed you last weekend, and because I’m so excited about the Design Office, you’re going to hear from me twice this week. Once today, and again tomorrow with the free masterclass. Maybe even the day after that. I can hardly stand it!
P.P.S. Join the waitlist HERE.