Hammer and Nail By Maida Korte

Venturing into the arena of construction was an easy decision for me. My love affair with interior design coincided with my belief that anything can be done if I just work hard enough.

This idealism has driven me for most of my life, eventually taking an emotional toll that left me exhausted, nervous, with anxiety talons sinking into soft and tender parts of me. 

A hard decision was determining to do something about it. By wrapping myself in a writerly blanket and telling the story of my rejuvenation, I discovered a better way to handle the tyranny of the urgent. I have become a calmer person as a result. 

I have had my share of defeat alongside success and writing about my journey is part of the practical therapy I now practice. I have pulled my ramshackle boat onto the shores of simple where I am building a life, but it wasn’t always this way.  

It is all very exciting in the beginning. Plans sparkle like a glowing ray of sunshine on the kitchen table where beautiful tile is dreamed about, and lust fills the heart of the homeowner while looking at new cabinets or bathtubs or wide plank wood flooring. It is a different matter entirely once construction begins.

Someday I want to walk into a client’s home and announce, “I am a Russian Interior Designer. It is all crrrrap. Rip it out!” 

Fear would grip the heart of everyone, and I would be obeyed, but instead, I must showcase a demure confidence to the client and pull out my hair behind the scenes. Here, behind the velvet curtain, is where I am arguing with sub-contractors, listening to the long and involved story of a supplier with a new excuse, begging city officials to please give me a tighter time-frame than oh, let’s say, sometime in the next month, while work is at a standstill, waiting for an approval to proceed.

The parallel universe of embracing life as an author follows a similar pattern. The argh of reading your own work with the accompanying desire to tear it to shreds is reminiscent of a normal day at work on a project.

I wrestle with truck drivers who want to deliver in the middle of the night, and displaced children, sleeping on the floor of the basement, with exhausted mothers and annoyed fathers escaping out the door, only to return to chaos at night. Irritation lurks behind every task with budgets that expand, never decreasing, time frames are delayed and deadlines are a joke. 

Reflecting on the daily rituals each of my design days demand, I see a mirror image reflected in every word I put on a page.

The bell curve of remodeling is upside down with most of the process sliding down into the cavern of discontent, but somewhere near the end, in a land we only catch little glimpses of, we see the beacon light of completion off in the distance and we crawl toward it like depleted and thirsty travelers.

Is this not an author’s plight? I wrestle with characters who meander off into incoherence and I must go find them and bring them back into clarity and purpose. I write for the beacon light of a good phrase, or clear prose, or a single word that is pinched into place. Design is like that and my duo life as a writer takes me through the looking glass.  

Rather than crawl into a hole and die, and there are days where that sounds nice, I decide to don armor worthy of the battle ahead. I refuse to give in to the dark horse stampeding through projects and essays, causing anxiety, angst and eventually apathy.   

I have swallowed the bitter pill of failure numerous times, but eventually, like the break of day dawning, I discovered small steps up and out of the pit of despair and into the ambient lighting that only a well-designed home can emit.

Interior design provides solutions for improving the lives of humans, and I like to think that reading words on a page guide us toward a similar reflection. Stopping doors from hitting us in the face and holding chaos at bay, these corrections are often never implemented. Houses stay unimproved, books are never read, and homeowners stay annoyed and perhaps unenlightened. Enter the design-build model of interior design, a place I have held court for nearly forty decades, with much fodder for writing inspiration.

I grew up around construction, so I was comfortable with dirt and dust. My childhood street was not paved, and every year trucks would come with fresh limestone gravel which would be spread and tapped down, splaying clouds of yellow dust into the air. 

For several weeks after, the road would feel new and smooth, until tires from heavy cars with routine routes back and forth, would rut the road again, creating large sloppy puddles when it rained, splashing anyone venturing to their mailbox. Mixing this with the perpetual nearby new home build assured there was always a dirt hill somewhere to play on. 

The sound of hammer and nail punctuated my outdoor summer playtime from new residential construction sprouting up all around or remodeling existing homes with new space appendages. Most of the original houses in our neighborhood were small, providing a young and first-time homeowner something they could afford. As careers and paychecks grew, so did the houses.  

The first house my parents bought was built on a slab of concrete with a large yard surrounding it. Two bedrooms, a single kitchen with small, cordoned area for mechanicals including a washer and dryer, and a combination dining-living room, as the ‘great’ room creation had not yet been dreamed of. With four children in one bedroom, it was time to build on, and with very little thought as to where, a point and a prod was all that was necessary to begin the processing of building a bedroom for my parents.

 My brothers then took over one of the bedrooms, and my sister and me in the other, we were set and felt expansive. Sometime later a large extension went onto the back of the house forming another bedroom, with now two more siblings, and a family room where we could watch Creature Features huddling onto a ‘hide-a-bed’ on Saturday nights. 

A two-car garage went up at some point, with a basketball court behind made from two foot by two-foot patio stone, which created interesting bounces and heightened reflexes. Concrete patio with short walls made from concrete blocks surrounded several sides, chosen for the way they could be easily moved and changed when the whim to do so came over my mother.  

Always looking for a project, my mother was all about zip zip get it done. It was as though she couldn’t stand seeing things around her settle into a dream state. No way. Shake it up, don’t you dare get comfortable. We would come home from school with our rooms rearranged or the entrance to the patio set in a different spot. These projects could never take more than a day, and better yet, half a day.  

Projects started in the morning while we were at school and would be finished by the time we had walked home at the end of the day. I believe this is why I decided to spend my adult working life helping families find ways for their homes to work for them, providing them a little bit of solace in a hectic, fast paced world. Inspiration to pursue an MFA in creative writing was born from this maternal influence. Blending my passion for shaping space and ideas became the perfect canvas on which I could paint my life. 

With a mother who remained undaunted no matter what idea blew up in her mind and brothers who strapped tool belts around strong hips, this was my childhood cadence, all worthy schooling, teaching me how to give instructions to burly men watching me to see if I knew what I was talking about. I did and I do. 

But the mainstay of my education in the land of design-build has been the tripod of client, contractor, designer. With this triptych in place, we can rip anything apart and build it back better, something everyone needs and loves. My journey into self-reflection taught me similar lessons. Writing has replaced AutoCAD, and notebooks are my new rapidiograph.

Gutted: How An Old House Remodeled Me tells the story of how I found my center, returning to the things I love, which are the people and places that formed my simple beginnings. This is where I fell in love with design a long time ago. I reflect and see that designing my own dreams has been my greatest accomplishment. 

—

Maida Korte loves to write about the intersection of interior design and family life, revealing the humor, heart, and lessons found in both. A midwestern native with a tireless work ethic, she raised four daughters while running a design firm—an experience she jokes qualifies her to run a small country. A former HGTV guest, she holds degrees in interior design and writing. Gutted is her debut book. Maida lives in Lake in the Hills, Illinois, with her husband.

Gutted: How an Old House Remodeled Me

Fans of Under the Tuscan Sun and House Lessons will love Gutted, a witty, big-hearted tale of trading city lights for leaky pipes—and discovering that sometimes the best renovations happen on the inside.

What if the only way to rebuild your life is to begin by tearing down the walls?

When a successful designer, entrepreneur, and lifelong city dweller hesitantly agrees to follow her husband’s dream of country living, she doesn’t expect to be undone by a sagging Victorian farmhouse and the relentless wind howling through uninsulated walls. But as holes are patched and rooms slowly take shape, something surprising happens: space opens up. Not just in their crumbling home, but in her heart.

Told with humor, vulnerability, and the insight of a woman rebuilding more than just a house, From There to Here: How an Old House Remodeled Me is a love story—not only between a wife and her husband but also between a woman shaped by fast-paced living and a slower, quieter way of life. With each creaky floorboard and stripped layer of old wallpaper, Maida Korte discovers unexpected beauty, remembers buried dreams, and finds strength in the women who came before her.

For anyone who has ever wondered what lies beyond the edge of timelines and control, this is a warm, wise, and deeply human invitation to slow down, dig deep, and make peace with change—one shingle at a time.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing