52 Weeks Challenge

A reflection on two consecutive years of weekly writing, not as a literary project but as a discipline of attention. The piece contrasts 2024’s wide-angle exploration with 2025’s grounded friction, shaped by renovating an old house. Writing becomes a companion to work, decisions, and limits rather than an attempt at resolution. Less about expression or coherence, more about calibration, showing up, noticing what resists closure, and staying with something long enough to see one’s own contradictions.

I only needed three boards of drywall, and somehow that sent me down a rabbit hole. Drywall is everywhere, fast, predictable, cheap, and invisible – until you have to remove it. As I bagged the old panels, I started wondering where all this material ends up, and why there seem to be so few alternatives. Convenience has a way of hiding systems, and drywall might be one of the best examples of how something so clean on the surface can be so complicated underneath.

I noticed something this weekend while we had guests: they live our house differently than we do. They sit where we don’t, walk routes we’ve forgotten, rearrange small things without hesitation. In doing so, they reveal parts of the home we no longer see. Watching others feel at ease in your space is a quiet reminder that a home isn’t fixed, it keeps becoming itself, shaped not only by those who live there, but by those who pass through.

Splitting wood looked easy on YouTube, which should have been my first warning. This weekend I tried to cut some of the fallen trees around the house, using the beautiful old axes the previous owner left behind. Technique matters more than strength, and I have neither yet. I learned to read the wood, aim for the cracks, avoid the center, and accept that nothing about this is graceful. I’m learning the hard way – literally – one awkward swing at a time.

I’ve spent the last week sorting through decades’ worth of tools, from the practical to the strange to the beautifully unnecessary. Some I’ll use, many I won’t, but each one carries a story, mine or the previous owner’s. I’m keeping a few of each, the best, the oldest, and the oddest. A pruning saw, a bent awl, a heavy center punch… tools that may never work again but still deserve a home. They remind me that making is also remembering.

A weekend of renovation work left my hands bruised, scraped, and stinging under hot water, and strangely, that made me pause. I spend most of my week behind a computer, but these hands have lived other lives: cuts from old projects, numb spots from old mistakes, callouses from tools, not instruments. They are clunky, uneven, imperfect, and completely mine. We forget how much they do until they hurt. This week, I found myself grateful for them.

I’ve been reading Never Too Small and Apartamento, two magazines that look almost identical but couldn’t be more different. One is obsessed with how spaces work; the other with how people live in them. Together they reminded me of something I keep noticing these days: homes gather meaning fast, no matter how long you’ve been in them. A lived space is always a mix of intention and accident, logic and story, and that balance says more about us than we think.

Instructional design is a real discipline, but it rarely reaches everyday products. This weekend I assembled a sauna and wrestled with a power tool’s cryptic interface, both cases where bad instructions turned design into frustration. Great instructions are invisible; bad ones shout. They define how much we trust the product, the brand, and even ourselves. We may forgive flaws in form or finish, but never in the moment a product fails to tell us how to use it.

We filled a Tacoma bed and made over $300 at the scrapyard, one man’s junk turned cash. My friend helped me separate copper, aluminum and iron; the place looked rough but ran like a small, lean economy. Men shouted in Spanish, cranes moved with octopus arms and a compactor turned scrap into bricks. It wasn’t romantic, but it was honest work. For quick cash and minimal fuss, the scrapyard is the place – ugly, efficient, and quietly essential.