Trial and Error

Delete. Delete. Delete. Undo. Undo. Undo. Shayna hit the backward arrow on her computer until she was once again looking at a blank page. Nothing looked right. The colors didn’t match, the patterns clashed, and the layout looked awkward. This was the sixth draft she had started and deleted in an hour. She was going to throw something. Better yet, at a person. Specifically, her mother for making her do this ridiculous task. She would never actually throw something at her mother, but it was fun to entertain the thought for the time being. 

UGHHH. Shayna groaned for the thousandth time. Shayna couldn’t remember another time when she had been more frustrated. Being bad at something wasn’t something Shayna was used to. She had stellar grades, was captain of the varsity lacrosse team at her school, had made it to state finals three years in a row for track her school’s track team, had won photography contests and played the violin. Much to the aggravation and envy of everyone around her, including friends, family members, and classmates,  Shayna was naturally good at many things. She could pick something up and miraculously learn how to do it well within a very short time. Being good at things was her thing.

For example, her friend Anne was a fantastic photographer. She had gone to camps, taken classes, and self-taught herself to take amazing photos. She had put the time, work, and dedication to becoming a great photographer. A year back, Shayna had picked up one of Anne’s cameras out of curiosity and asked Anne to show her how some of the basic techniques for photography. Anne had shown her, and within a month of Shayna fiddling with a camera, Shayna was taking photos as good as Anne’s. This had pissed off Anne for a long time. She had long since gotten over it for the most part, but occasionally Anne would say things that implied she was still salty about Shayna’s immediate grasp of a skill that had taken her years to master. 

Unfortunately, Shayna’s natural talent for everything seemed to have skipped over the design portion of skill. Anything design related - clothes, rooms, art - came out disastrous when Shayna put her input on things. She had absolutely zero skill when it came to matching colors, understanding shapes, and combining patterns. Even when she was young, her clothes never matched. She would pair plaid pants and a polka-dotted shirt and think she looked great. Her mother used to be mortified to go out with Shayna in public because of her lack of fashion sense. And Shayna, of course, had been told that she was very good at almost everything she did for most of her life. So her arrogance made Shayna stubborn, and she refused to change. Shayna had genuinely believed that her mother wanted to stifle her mismatched fashion from the world because she was jealous of Shayna’s ability to pair clothes effortlessly. Eventually, Shayna had realized that she seriously lacked skill in fashion and design, and stuck to a generally easy guideline created by her sister: dark on the bottom with any color on top. It worked about 93% of the time. 

Something even more unfortunate than Shayna’s lack of fashion sense was that her mother had grown tired of her desperate lack of skill in design. Especially since her mother was an interior designer. Honestly, it was a shock that her mother had tolerated it for this long. It had taken her nearly seventeen years to come to a breaking point. Over the years, Shayna had done her best to avoid anything and everything having to do with any sort of design once she realized that it was the one area of expertise that she lacked. To force Shayna to get better at this, her mother had given Shayna the task of designing one of the rooms in the house she was working on currently. She believed it would be good practice and would help Shayna at least have a mediocre sense of design rather than an atrocious one. 

The program on Shayna’s laptop displayed a blank room with no furniture in it except a window in the center of the wall across from the door. There were so many options on the side panel of the screen. Where did she even start? Carpet vs hardwood floor? If carpet, what pattern? If hardwood floors, what shade of brown? Rug or no rug? What type of shades? What shade of a specific color for the walls? It was all too much. Shayna wasn’t an artist; she didn’t know what it felt like to have a blank canvas and just start creating. 

Shayna picked up her phone and opened her messages to her mom. 

This is too hard

I can’t do it

Idek where to start

A few seconds later the grey bubble appeared indicating her mother was responding, and a moment later a text came through. 

Just put something down. Worry about the details later. You always start with bigger things first and then get to the smaller things. 

But like what?

What do I start with? 

The floor/ carpet

If you want, go downstairs and go through some of the design magazines on the coffee table for inspiration

It might help you see some ideas of what goes together and options of what you can do

Shayna sighed. Ok, she typed back. 

She found the magazines in the living room. There were a lot of them, so she grabbed two and went back to her room to look through them. She was supposed to design a preteen girl’s room. A list of some of the girl’s likes and dislikes were on a post-it her mother had given Shayna to help her get started. She disliked the color pink, liked flowers, and loved playing soccer. She also loved traveling, and absolutely did not want a vanity in her room. When Shaya was a preteen, the decoration in her room consisted of trophies and award certificates. She didn’t care about the pattern of the comforter or the style of her nightstand. As long as she had those, she didn’t care what it looked like. 

Shayna flipped through the pages, paying close attention to what color the floors were, where the bed was placed, what the type of headboard was used, what color the desk was, what color was used to make things stand out, etc. She jotted down a few notes and bookmarked specific pages where she liked the design of the room. 

Shayna opened up her laptop again and took a deep breath. 

Ok. I can do this. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I just need something. Literally anything. 

She loaded the design program again and took another deep breath before hovering her mouse on the Flooring tab. Upon clicking on it, tons of options for wood, carpet, and tiles spilled across the screen. Shayna had decided to keep it simple and not even worry about tiles and carpet, narrowing her choices to only hardwood floors. Looking through the shades of brown, she found herself being drawn to the medium colors of hardwood floors. She picked a color called Honey Wood, adjusted the size of the individual slabs, and hit enter. The white screen in front of her was no longer blank. There was a depth to the room that hadn’t been there a few seconds before. Shayna breathed a sigh of relief. With the floors filled, the room suddenly seemed less intimidating. Floors, check! 

Obviously there was still an abundance of things to put in, but Shayna felt accomplished. She had taken a step forward. Feeling brave, she ventured into the paint section. Within three seconds of seeing the literal trillions of options she had, she exited out of the tab. Nope. Coming back to that later, she thought. She had seen an idea from one of the magazines where there were shelves along the wall of the window, directly adjacent to them. She found the shelving tab and scrolled through, trying to find something similar to what she had seen in the magazine. She clicked on one and shelves appeared on the screen. Dragging it over to the space between the wall and the edge of one of the windows, she sized it so it lay perfectly in between. There was an option to make the shelves built-in vs hanging. She clicked on the built-in option and the shelves were pushed back into the walls. Perfect. 

Feeling more and more relieved every second she looked at the room that was slowly coming together, she got to work with putting in a bed and a desk. Slowly but surely, the room started to fill up. Put the bigger things first, and then focus on the details. 

Half an hour later, she had put in a full-sized bed between the two windows, a white desk in the opposite corner of the room, and a hanging bean chair in the corner that didn’t have the shelves. She filled the bottom few shelves with books and the rest with small accessories she found in the program database. Shayna finally came to a point where she was forced to pick a wall color. Sighing, she picked up one of the magazines she had strewn across her bed earlier and flipped through them, looking for a design with a wall color she liked. Shayna kept seeing neutral colors for the walls, and a brighter color on the bed or as accents, so she decided to try that. She went to the color picker and picked a light grey color. She clicked on all the walls she wanted it on and voila! The room wasn’t bare! It had furniture! It wasn’t boring white! She had gotten almost all of the big details done! Plus, grey matched with virtually any color so it wouldn’t be a struggle to match the walls to the comforter to the rug, should she decide to put one in.

Shayna sighed and sat back in her chair, smiling at her work. The walls were still bare and the room had zero decoration except for the shelves, but it looked decent! It wasn’t atrocious and didn’t make one want to gouge their eyes out. She had gotten a little carried away with the small details for the shelves, temporarily forgetting about the larger details of the rest of the room. She had somehow managed to get lost in decorating. The shelves looked a bit out of place, being the only thing in the room that had a significant amount of detail. Despite her detail to the shelves, she knew that they may not be decorated in real life the way she had designed them in the program; the girl might put other things in there. Nevertheless, she was still proud of how they looked. 

Shayna’s phone dinged. It was her mother. 

How’s it going? 

Her phone made clicking sounds as she typed back a response. 

Good

Almost done

Kinda

Did all the big stuff, now gotta start the details 

Yay! Can’t wait to see it 

Shayna picked up the post-it that had a list of things the girl liked and disliked, and tried to come up with a way to incorporate all of the likes into her design. If she put all three things - soccer, flowers, and traveling - into the room together, it might look awkward. Hmm. She could do the flowers and travel; that wouldn’t look weird. 

For the next hour, Shana played around with the accessories the program offered, citing the magazines and google images of teen bedrooms for inspiration. The program had the ability to input a pattern found on real websites into the design, so she inputted a comforter pattern she found from Pottery Barn into the design. This made the room more authentic-looking, plus, if the girl liked it, this comforter could easily be implemented into her bedroom in real life. She found a world map on a canvas that she hung over the bed and surrounded it with fairy lights. The room was becoming more and more realistic as she added details to the walls, mixing her own ideas with ideas she found in the magazines and online. 

When Shayna was done, she was very proud of what she had done. She was fairly certain that the colors matched, and the patterns weren’t too much. She wanted to show her mother, so she set out to find her. She found her sitting in the living room, working on her laptop. 

Her mother peered at Shayna from under her glasses when Shayna walked into the room. 

“Done?” she asked.

Shayna grinned proudly. “Yup! Look.”

Her mother moved her laptop off her lap and Shayna handed her her own laptop. 

“Did you find the program confusing?” 

“No, but they didn’t always have what I imagined in my head,” Shayna responded. 

“Yes, the program has a lot but not everything,” 

Her mother put the program into a 360° view mode and slowly turned through the whole room. 

“Wow, Shayna, this looks great! I love the shelves,” her mother commented. 

“Ooh, and the hanging chair! That looks nice!” 

Her mother handed back her laptop when she was done. 

“That’s a great improvement from everything else you’ve done. And there’s a lot more potential for that room. I can show you what else could go in there if you’d like. But it looks great so far!” her mother offered.

Shayna shook her head. “No, thanks. I did my part of the design that you asked me too, and now I’ll go back to what I’m good at, which is everything else. There were too many options and choices. It was overwhelming,” Shayna explained, taking her laptop back. 

“Once you narrow down what you want to do, it becomes a lot simpler. If you have a vision for how you want something to look, it’s easy,” 

“I had no idea how to design this room. I didn’t even know what I wanted it to look like, so it was so overwhelming to go through the thousands of choices for everything,” Shayna said.

Her mother laughed. “Yes, it can be overwhelming, but if you practice it becomes less and less overwhelming. You start to develop a style that you tend to stick to,” her mother responded. 

Shayna shook her head again. “Mom, I appreciate what you do now more than ever, but I am literally never doing this again. My brain hurts,”

“You’ll change your mind eventually,” 

“I doubt it,” 

Shayna went back upstairs and sat on her bed. She looked through her design again, admiring her work for a second. She really was proud of her work. She didn’t have an eye for design, and probably never would, but she had decorated a room all on her own. She had conquered an area of expertise that she never thought she would. Well, maybe not conquered but at least improved on. And that was something she could be proud of.