Guest Post - Rocking This Old House

Hi there, this is Melissa's husband, Kevin.  You may have noticed that Melissa has not been posting a lot lately (despite my consistent pestering), so I decided to jump in and brag about her for a bit (get over it honey....you can't really brag about yourself, but when it's true, your husband can!)

She has been missing-in-action because she has been busting it out with a bunch of interior design clients in Newton, Wellesley, Weston, Boston and Belmont, as well as putting in a Herculean effort for This Old House.  To give you an idea of a very small portion of the work going into the TOH project in Auburndale, the homeowner wrote this post about the mammoth number of decisions that must be made during the project and how working with Melissa was making the project so much easier and more fun.  My favorite part about this post is that she never even knew these pictures were being taken, and yet she is smiling and having fun in every one.  I never get to see her working on site with clients, but when you like your job this much and you are really good at it, it is no wonder her clients write such incredible testimonials.  I mean, these things made me blush and they weren't even about me.

Last week she was down in Fall River, MA at the Merida Meridian carpet factory filming an episode for the show.  I'm not sure if you've ever been involved in the filming of a television show, but it was a full 8 hour day for about 10 minutes of actual programming on the show.  Because the Sharmas (the clients for TOH) love rich warm colors and are eager to reflect that in paint and fabrics, they would find it hard to locate carpets that worked with the color palatte for the house.  Merida was great at allowing Melissa to custom color the carpets for the entire house so they connected all the colors and made the rooms truly come together.  The episode will walk viewers through this process and how carpets are manufactured (who knew they still made carpets in the US...yea!)

Her weekend project was pulling together, organizing, labeling and shipping all of the paint colors, samples, fabrics, carpet swatches, etc. for the entire project to This Old House Magazine so they can start writing up the article about the finished project.  Of course, being her, she couldn't just send them along, she had to pull together and photograph room schemes for the entire house, label each item with a key (i.e. living room wall = A1 paint color, window treament = A5 fabric), tie that key back to each sample, put the entire list into a spreadsheet documenting everything.  Needless to say the editors were blown away.  As Melissa said, "hey, a little OCD goes a long way".

I am hoping she does not either kill me for posting without telling her or erase this beacuse she feels too modest.(both very real possibilities)  Many of our friends are wanting to have viewing parties for the first episode she's in but if I know her she will be watching from under the covers and one eyeball sheilded to brace for possible horror if she doen't like the way she comes across.  OK, I could go on all day, but I need to get back to work.  I've been noticing that she's been devouring a ton of magazines lately, so don't be surprised if the posts start picking up again soon.