7 Myths About Your Designer

If you know my mom at all you know her personality is pretty out there. She’s crazy and quirky, yet wildly creative and passionate about what she does. Trying to tame her ENTP personality is like trying to teach a cat to fetch. As impossible as it is, I’ve often tried to embark on this endeavor. In fact, we often joke that the parent-daughter roles are reversed as I’m always trying to discipline her and keep her focused by setting clear boundaries. At Trader Joe’s, for example,  I’ll say, “Fine. You can have five minutes in the wine aisle. But after that we’re leaving.” And often when she’s talking a million miles a minute, switching from one topic to the next, then going back to the original topic five minutes later, assuming I was following along with her whole train of thought, I have to reign her in to decipher her actual point. Over the past 24 years I’ve gotten pretty good at this. But the truth is, while my mom’s über curious and impassioned nature may make her seem a bit nutty at times (which she undoubtedly is), it’s also what makes her so good at what she does. It’s also this 24 years of experience that gives me both the resources and liberty to dispel the following myths and unveil facts about my mom, the woman you know as the Vice President and Designer at Northland Build, you may have otherwise never known.

1. She’s always so put together. Living in the same house with someone your whole life you can’t avoid learning all their idiosyncrasies. And my mom definitely isn’t short on them. One of the many is the creative way of putting up her hair when she’s in the middle of housework. She’ll find a pencil or one of those brushes hairstylists use, twirl her hair up, and stick the object right through. I always offer her a hair tie like a normal person but she insists on the random tool she’s found. So there she’ll be in the kitchen or doing laundry with chopsticks sticking out of her head, her hair wildly arranged around it, and her having no idea how ridiculous she looks. So next time Gina shows up to an appointment or you see her on a Standard TV & Appliance commercial looking all polished and put together, you’ll know she doesn’t just wake up looking like that.
   

   ---

2. I bet her home looks like something straight out of Better Homes & Gardens. While my parents do have an amazing home on 10 acres, built by my dad and grandfather over 20 years ago, there are certainly aspects of it I wouldn’t exactly call magazine-worthy. Remember that classic saying, “The shoemaker’s children have no shoes”? Well, in 4th grade my parents remodeled my bedroom. It was originally a storage room with a slanted ceiling, making it hard to live in once I moved from sharing a room with my sister (who hogged the closet, bathroom and bed) into the unused storage room. After the room was done, and with a new window facing the driveway, I asked for blinds to be put in. When our neighbor put a vineyard in a few years later, the driveway-facing window became not

   

   the only problem. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to hit the deck as if someone just yelled “bomb!” while in the middle of getting dressed because the vineyard workers were making their rounds on the property. You’d think this would have been reason enough to put my blinds in, but here we are, 14 years later, and I’m still waiting on them. But it doesn’t apply to just the children. At one point my mom decided she wanted to redo our back bathroom, the second of two bathrooms on the main floor. Four years later the bathroom is finally finished. Then there’s the staircase. With a messy dog who destroyed the carpet over the years, my mom, fed up with the mess, had my brother rip it all off, leaving the bare wood staircase. Now at least when Pepper carries her lattes from off the counter, up the stairs, onto the landing to drink them we don’t have to worry about her spilling any on the carpet.

   ---

3. She’s such an energizer bunny. Okay, so this one is pretty much true. I remember being in high school and having her come into my room early in the morning, talking before the door was even open as if we’d already been in the middle of a conversation. One day I found this proverb that says, “If a man loudly blesses his neighbor early in the morning it will be taken as a curse.” First thing I did was show it to my mom and said, “See, it’s even in the Bible.” She laughed and said, “Okay, okay, I get it.” This over-talkativeness translates into other areas of her life too, like her work ethic. She’s always going non-stop, whether it be meeting with clients, composing emails, drawing up the latest floor plan designs, or putting dinner on the table. You may know all this about her; if you’re a client it’s probably something you admired about her and appreciated. But what you may not know is how hard she crashes. She has this funny habit of falling asleep on her chaise lounge while watching West Wing or The Mentalist, then, waking up in the last 10 minutes of the show will say, “Wait, what happened? I dozed for a minute. Was the husband the killer?” to which my dad replies, “Dear, that was two episodes ago.”
   

   ---

4. She must watch a lot of HGTV. No. She doesn’t. In fact, she doesn’t even like it. While my mom is extremely passionate about what she does, she’s full of other passions as well. When she’s not working on new designs or meeting with clients, she’s usually YouTube-ing the latest glute-activating exercises from Bret Contreras, or buying 13 new money management books on Amazon. I always try to remind her that curiosity killed the cat, but it doesn’t seem to stop her from sending me 4 new emails with links to articles she read that morning– all before 5 am.

   

   ---

5. All she eats are Altoids and cheese sticks. This one actually makes me lol. While I don’t deny my mom’s Altoids addiction– she seriously has a problem– she certainly eats real food. And her sweet tooth knows no bounds. We often have to hide the chocolate stash from her, and ice cream is not even allowed in the house as she will eat it. And I mean she will eat it all.
   

   ---

6. She must love to go running. My mom loves to be social. While working out and running are a huge part of her life, as they relieve stress and make her feel healthier and happier, she doesn’t necessarily love to run. Trust me. I run with her quite a bit and neither of us are ever exceedingly excited about doing it. But as long as she can chat during her run, or meet up with her Starbucks crew post-workout, the physical exertion is always worth it.
   

   ---

7. Once my remodel is done she’ll forget all about me. Not only is Gina passionate about her job, she’s passionate about her clients. She loves working with all sorts of people from the downtown Portland working couple to wine country retirees. Every person is a new experience, a new adventure, and each one teaches her something new. This is what she lives for. This is the very reason she started this blog in the first place– to stay connected with her appreciated clients and keep them involved not only in her business, but her life.

 

Meet the author. Passionate writer. Avid dog lover. Rod and Gina’s daughter. Read Michaela’s full bio here.