You Don't Need Permission to Begin

Here is the thing I believe most, and the reason this website exists: you do not need permission to begin.

Not from an expert. Not from a certificate. Not from the version of yourself who has finally read everything, bought the right tools, and cleared a free weekend that is never, ever coming. You need a point of view, enough curiosity to start, and the willingness to learn in public. The rest is developing.

I say this as someone with a mid-1800s San Francisco painter's house, very specific taste, and a growing list of things I have never done before. I am not a contractor. I am not an architect. I am not the person you should call about your wiring. I do, however, have strong opinions about the curve of a handrail, the way a door closes, and the blue that is almost right, which is somehow worse than the blue that is obviously wrong.

For a long time, the culture told me those two facts were in conflict. Strong taste, no credentials: pick one. Either be qualified, or be quiet.

I would like to formally decline.

The claim

Waiting for permission feels responsible. It looks like diligence. It is usually fear wearing a blazer.

The permission we wait for almost never arrives, because nobody is in charge of issuing it. There is no office. There is no form. There is no one whose job is to tap you on the shoulder and say, "You may now paint the staircase." The people who seem to have permission mostly just started, and then kept going long enough that it looked planned.

The proof

The proof, for now, is sitting in a box. Well. It was.

In August I bought a Wonderjune Outdoor Library Box Kit for my son. He bailed. (He is not coming. I have made peace with this. Mostly.) So the kit sat downstairs collecting dust and judgment, and I had a choice: donate it, or become the kind of woman who paints a little library to look like her house.

Obviously I chose the second one.

The house is beige and green now. I want it yellow someday. So the library is going to be yellow first: a tiny, very reasonable rehearsal for a very unreasonable exterior repaint. It is getting a proper name, too. The painter Giuseppe Cadenasso once lived in this house and called it "Sign of the Eucalyptus." The little library will wear that name on a plaque, because if you are going to do something slightly ridiculous, you should at least do it with a sense of history.

Do I know how to finish unfinished pine for outdoor life in San Francisco fog? Not yet. Do I know exactly where it can legally go? I know there are rules, and I know I have questions. Will I film the whole thing, including the parts where I stare at the instructions like they have personally wronged me? Yes. That's the point.

I'm building it, on camera, and writing it down here. You can follow the whole thing on the project page. And if you'd rather watch someone begin with zero experience first: Part 1 of the fireplace is already live.

The reframe

"You don't need permission" is not the same as "you don't need to learn." I want to be very clear about that, because this is not an anti-expert website. I love experts. I will call them. I will tell you when I called them. Some of the work will be mine and some of it will belong to someone who actually knows, and I will say which is which.

The reframe is this: permission is not a prerequisite. It's a byproduct. You don't get qualified and then begin. You begin, and the qualification accumulates, one revised estimate at a time.

And beginning does not mean lowering your standards. It means the opposite. It means caring enough about how something could look that you are willing to be seen not knowing how to get it there yet. The process is unqualified. The taste isn't.

This is anti-perfectionism. It is not anti-ambition. I want the beautiful version. I want it badly. I am just no longer willing to wait for a certificate of readiness before I start walking toward it.

What you've entered

Beautifully Unqualified is a life and projects archive for doing ambitious things with taste, nerve, questionable planning, and absolutely no pretense of knowing everything.

The house is the first doorway, not the whole building. There will be staircases, an unreasonable amount of blue, old doors worth keeping, a tiny kitchen that needs approximately one more inch, and a garden that is, regrettably, on a hill. There will also be essays, opinions, revised opinions, and the occasional gloriously impractical idea.

What there won't be: fake ease, expertise cosplay, or an edit that makes the difficult parts disappear. (More on that in what this space is, and is not.)

Go deeper

• If the thing stopping you is the feeling that you're not ready yet, read The Myth of Feeling Ready.
• If you want to watch me do the thing instead of talk about it, start with the fireplace, Part 1, then the little library project.
• New here? Start Here.

Big ideas. No plan. Lots of opinions. Let's begin.