#I used to have a thing on my website that said 'Mr. Velocipede is a rude lady'

[mrvelocipede]

I spent some time this afternoon in a slightly cold-ish haze, applying stain samples to pieces of wood. Some of the resulting colors may end up on the floorboards, eventually. The weird blue-greens are in there because I want to mix small amounts of them in with some of the browns, to make better shades of brown.

It's absolutely mind-boggling how many different individual components go into building a house. There are obvious materials, like framing lumber and drywall and bricks. (There are so many different kinds of bricks. We got to go to a neat warehouse and look at hundreds of samples of bricks, in many shades of red and orange and brown and yellow and off-white, with and without speckles, spots, textures, kiln-firing marks, and so on and so forth.) But then basically every single visible surface and fixture has to be chosen, and they all have to work together and look reasonably harmonious.

Floorboards. Tile. Faucets. Cabinet doors. Room doors. Doorknobs. Cabinet handles. Sconces and various light fixtures. Window trim moldings. Stair railings. Roof material. Countertop material.

I've learned that kitchen countertops can be made of laminate, like old-school Formica, or else slabs of stone or stone-like materials, and there's very little middle ground in terms of aesthetics or cost. It's either way low-end or way high-end. I mean, there are cheaper and more expensive kinds of stone slabs, but it's all stone, with significant fabrication costs on top of the base material price.

For most of these things, you have to go to showrooms and deal with sales people. And at that point, I begin to run into difficulties.

See, on the internet I get to be the fascinating and mysterious Mr. Velocipede, and talk about whatever projects I've been working on, and post pictures of things I've made. People are willing to think of me as competent, or in some categories an actual expert to some degree, and it's a fairly comfortable persona to inhabit. It's very easy to forget that in the offline world, I'm a very ordinary-looking middle-aged housewife kind of thing. It's not how I think of myself, but it's definitely what I look like to any outside observer.

During the house-building project, I've been constantly, incessantly reminded of why I became Mr. Velocipede in the first place: being a girl in this culture sucks.

I don't actually mind being female (although I often feel like I'm kind of crap at it), but the kinds of assumptions made about you are so fucking insultingly stupid that I've never really figured out how to respond to them. You're supposed to use Pinterest boards and read magazines full of fairy-tale cottages and have a "dream kitchen" that you've been fantasizing about since you got married and stopped fantasizing about your dream wedding.

You're supposed to want to hide all your appliances neatly in tasteful cupboards, so as not to offend guests with your unsightly refrigerator or microwave or washing machine. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain to people that I don't want a special board that attaches to my cabinets, to hide the side of the refrigerator. "But you'll see the side of the refrigerator!" they admonish me. "It's not finished the same as the front! It doesn't match the cabinets!"

Yeah, okay, but what if I like having a magnetic surface to stick things on? What if I don't want to spend money on a random unnecessary board that basically dangles from the upper cabinet?

And there is always, always the assumption that you cannot possibly know anything at all about materials and how they work. I got to listen to quite a long speech about how window screens actually block a certain percentage of the light. Did I know that? Well, yes, as a matter of fact I did. That was why I was asking about getting half-screens, instead of ones that cover the entire window.

It turns out that color is a very stressful subject for a lot of people, which I guess I sort of knew, but am now having to cope with more directly. Our architect is all stressed out because I haven't chosen a stain color yet, and I scared him by buying a bunch of sample bottles of weird bright colors of stain. I've been trying to reassure him that I'm very happy to figure out how to mix a custom stain color myself, out of whatever stock colors exist, but this is apparently unheard of.

But I am flat-out refusing to just pick one of the existing stock colors, because they are all too jarringly harsh and simple, and not at all the effect I want. And I can't figure out how to convey the idea that I know how to work with color, I understand that it's going to look different on different kinds of wood, I know what I'm doing, and I'm not going to burst into tears if it doesn't look like some reference photo in a brochure. Those brochures all look awful, and I know I can do better, if only people will stop calling me "little lady" and let me fucking get on with it.