There is a certain order to most things. That is, until there isn’t. I got to experience this first hand last week while staying at a hotel while attending a conference. It is a hotel I stay in nearly every year so I have a certain order, a particular rhythm to my arrival, my waking and sleeping, my departure. However, this year many of the things I had come to expect and count on were upended. Upon arrival I was thrown into the renovation of the hotel lobby as it changes from one owner to another. Walking into the space that had always been sleek and orderly, I was confronted head on with boxes piled high, floors that were ripped up and in the process of being tiled, chairs and sofas wrapped in plastic and stacked like doll house furniture. It was immediately unnerving as a feeling of having walked into the set of a DIY show washed over me.

At first I wondered about the noise. What time did the workers arrive…..as a saw that cut tile blared in my ears? Is the health club open? No. Will there be breakfast? Yes, but in a different room….one you get to through the torn up hallway and up the ramp. But I was soon to learn that the noise would be the least of my concerns. Over hearing that a wedding was happening in just two days and the space had to be ready, I began to notice how the tilers were still working at 10:00 o’clock at night and may literally have worked throughout the night for all I knew. I winced as we traipsed across the tiles, newly laid, not yet grouted. “Aren’t they supposed to ‘rest’ awhile before people can walk on them?” Someplace this cautionary voice from some long ago home project rang out in my head.

Coming down in the early morning, and I do mean early, the workers were already there, painting, hanging wallpaper, tiling, grouting….all simultaneously. Standing in the wings, others waited and as soon as one of these tasks was nearly completed, they swooped in to hang drapes while the wallpaper was still being smoothed. (My mother would have been horrified.)A few feet away surrounded by boxes both empty and still full, another worker was wiring up the large screen television setting the channel to a pastoral landscape that seemed so incongruous to what was going on all around. Scrape, swoosh, slap, bang. The sounds of frantic remodeling and decorating continued. 

As I walked into the lobby and climbed over yellow ‘caution’ tape,I noticed one nook of the lobby had been filled with furniture and there were now books on the shelves. Only a few feet away workers knelt still laying flooring and others stood on scaffolding, painting and hanging wallpaper near the ceiling. “What if the paint drops”, I thought, “or the wallpaper comes crashing down on the unprotected new furniture?” 

Each trip through the lobby raised my anxiety level. Upstairs, hotel staff were working away preparing the room where the wedding reception would happen. White lights twinkled in the doorways and across the ceiling. Tablecloths were being spread on tables while the dance floor was being prepared. Downstairs was pandemonium and upstairs everything was slowly unfolding.

Since I have returned from this experience, I have thought back so many times about what it all triggered in me. I recognized that it was not the clutter or even the work that seemed impossible to complete in a timely way that got to me. It was that the process they were employing seemed so out of an order I understood. Floors, painting, wallpapering,then furniture, artwork, drapes. That’s an order I get. But who said it had to be that way?

My sense is that the couple who was married and had their reception at this hotel won’t have a clue as to what took place the days before they arrived in celebration. It won’t matter a lick that the drapes were hung before the floor was finished and that the television was set to go before the furniture was in place. In the end, it all worked out which is all that really matters. 

There is a certain order to things……until there isn’t.