90% Complete
A few weeks ago, I took a weekend to paint and almost finish a bathroom remodel project in our house. A week or two before that my husband had changed out the vanity and some of the other fixtures. Not a major renovation, but enough of an overhaul that it feels fresh. The plan is to still add some tile to the walls, but that comes with finding the right tile. So that part of the project is on its own timeline.
The finishing touch for our bathroom for the time being is updating the window coverings. More than six years after moving in, our bathroom still has these dingy, white half-curtains from the previous owners. It took me a few weeks after the rest of the project wrapped, but I finally ordered privacy film to install instead. The window film is still sitting untouched in its box, more than a week after it arrived.
I’ll get to it, most likely within the next week or so. It will take me a couple hours on a Saturday, and I’ll probably spring clean all the windows in the house on the same day. Because part of the proper install process involves having clean windows, and then more soapy water. And in the meantime, our bathroom renovation will remain almost finished.
I feel like most projects happen in this way. We’ve redone almost every room in our house since moving in, and most of the outside too. And every time, it’s those final finishing touches that are the biggest struggle to complete. It feels like satisfaction sets in when we’ve done most of the work, when the heavy lifting on a project is out of the way. Somehow it’s the light lifting, the final details that seem too tedious to complete.
When we built our back deck a few summers ago, I waited until the last possible weekend to stain and seal it before the snow came. It wasn’t until we were re-installing the molding in our bathroom that we finally replaced the molding along our baseboards in the dining room, five years after we first took the pieces out. At least three years [maybe four] after installing the French doors, I finally painted them. And varnished the trim around the doors, and a window in the living room.
It isn’t every project. They don’t all take months or years to finally complete. But when it happens, it isn’t just the home renovations that stall out a few meters before the finish line. It’s buying the ingredients for a recipe at the grocery store, then taking weeks to make what you intended. It’s folding clean laundry and bringing it upstairs, then taking three days to move it from laundry basket to drawers.
Maybe we are satisfied once we know a project would earn us a low A or a B if it we were completing it for school. Once we’ve reached the point of good enough, we decide not to worry too much about the final polish. Why are we willing to work hard for most of the race, but coast through what could be our finishing kick? What is it about that last ten percent that holds us back?
You can always be tinkering with a project when it’s mostly done. I think we all find it easy to say I still need to… when we show our work. It’s a safety net. Before someone else judges what we’ve done, or we step back and judge for ourselves, we can say well, I know this isn’t really my best work. And why is that? Why do we hesitate to put in our best effort? And even when we do, why do we hesitate to admit that our work is the best we could do?
Completion is a commitment. When you say yes to a certain finishing touch on a project you end the tinkering. That yes means saying no to every other possibility in that moment, and that yes means your work is ready for sharing even if you don’t feel ready to share it.
We tend to forget something though. We forget that a finished project doesn’t have to be a final product. When we step back and commit to completion, we can still adjust if we’re truly not satisfied. We can’t go back in time to undo work. But we can redo work, again and again if necessary, until we’re proud.
Most of the time I find that I’m satisfied with the version in front of me. I can see the flaws in my work, but I’m content saving the lessons I learned for improving the next project. When I look at the wall I should have spackled smoother before painting, I can also look at the wall you’d never know needed repair under the paint. It’s growth and improvement along the way, visible in each room of my house.
It’s progress towards mastery. Progress I would never see if I didn’t commit to the last ten percent. Progress that sometimes takes years to see because I stop for a picnic in the final meters before the finish line. But you can’t know the work that’s actually worth redoing until you commit to finishing the version in front of you.
Sometimes the versions we stall to complete are really meant to be our rough drafts. If we never un-stall ourselves, we’ll never get to the version of a project that makes us proud. Without committing to a final ten percent, we’ll never even see to the version we’d happily put our name on and show to other people.
We can’t be good at everything we try, but we can always get better. And it’s the last ten percent that shows us where we care enough to keep working towards better. Maybe you think the projects you’ve stalled out on are the ones you don’t care enough to finish, and maybe sometimes that’s true. But I think that those are often the projects we are scared to finish, because they are the ones we care most about.
The last ten percent of our projects teaches us a lot about ourselves. But maybe revisiting the projects we’ve abandoned in the home stretch would show us more.
