Planning for the house.

Summer vacation was going a lot faster than I realized. That and there was still stuff about the new house that we had to do. I had been asked to send a list of the paints, materials and all other kinds of things we’d want the house to have. It was honestly a little overwhelming, so I brought it up to the girls over the group chat one night.

Grace, surprisingly, asked if she could have a copy of the 3D map of the house Mr. Dale Moore, the architect, had shown me the other day. I did have a copy but hadn’t installed the software to edit it. When I sent it to Grace, she replied “Yeah, I can work with this. I’ll get back to you tomorrow.” That was when I remembered that Grace’s goal was to become an architect.

We all went to her house the next day and she led us to a work office we had never even set foot in before. Small, but it had many folders arranged in chronological order on a big shelf, and there was a desktop computer with a pretty big, high resolution screen on the sturdy wooden desk.

“This is my dad’s office,” Grace told us, making us all immediately stiffen. “Relax, I have permission. My laptop isn’t good enough to run the software, so I had to ask my dad to let me use his.”

“And he let you?” Noelle asked as if the mere concept was alien to her.

“It’s not the first time. I know my way around it. Remember, my dad has always wanted me to work with him, so he taught me how to use it a long time ago. When I asked him to let me use it again, he was practically beaming. Also…” Grace looked at me and smiled. “You gave me excellent ammo to use on him and my mom with this.”

“Ah?” Wait, is that good or bad?

“My dad is still very skeptical that you’ll actually have a house of your own,” Grace said. “He saw this and had **** but to believe it. Still, he’s a lot more confused on how the hell it is you can afford this.”

“What did you tell him?” Alice asked.

“The truth, sort of. Told him Oliver became friends with Luke Allen, the billionaire philanthropist, after he helped his girlfriend by catching the guy who tried to steal her purse and taking her to a hospital. Of course my dad knows the name Luke Allen already, and the guy has enough fame for him to believe that gifting someone a house is something he’d do. Told him Oliver is working for him now, but he still believes the house has to be a gift.”

“It sort of is and isn't," I mumbled.

“Anyway, here, look at it.”

It was already on the screen when we looked. What we saw was the 3D map of one of the bedrooms. When Mr. Moore had shown it to me, it had no colors or textures, but now it did.

“I tried messing around with the one that would be my bedroom. It’s mostly just stock items, colors and textures, but this is vaguely what it would look like.”

“Oh wow…” Diana said, looking at it closer. “The bed, the sheets, the closet, the color of the walls, the carpet on the floor… This is very impressive, Grace.”

“Not really. Like I said, I’m just messing around with stock items and colors, but even with this we can get an idea of how we want things to look.”

“Ah, and then we can go to the home improvement store and pick the real stuff with a clearer picture in mind,” Mila said, nodding in understanding.

“Exactly,” Grace said. “It’d be pretty difficult to pick stuff like beds and closets without even understanding how big the rooms are, and picking out colors without seeing how the final product would look like is asking for a mess.”

“Yeah…” Sarah said. “I was thinking that I want to paint my bedroom in purple or violet, but it’ll be much better if I can see how it’ll actually look in the end.”

Alice chuckled. “You really are amazing, Grace.”

“If I can make this easier on us, I will. That’s all it is. That said, I’ll need to have all of you sit here with me and tell me how you want your rooms to look. And for the rest of the house…” Grace glanced up at me, but I spoke before she could finish her sentence.

“We’ll have to figure it out together,” I told her. “You keep saying it’s my house, but we’ll all live there. You all get a say in it.”

“...” Grace sighed and smiled at me. “So long as the final say is yours. Any objections to that?”

“None,” the girls said.

“There you have it.”

“...Very well.” Know when to fold, Oliver. Weird as it is this time.

Of course, this wasn’t a task that lasted a single day. It took us days. We went to Grace’s house whenever we could for the next week, sometimes only one of us, sometimes more, only once more did the seven of us get together again. It was once we had a finished draft of the full house.

It was just a rough sketch, in a way. Using simple colors and textures and generic items for ‘bed’ and ‘toilet’ and everything else. But even so… It was the house. Our house.

We couldn’t help but get giddy looking at it.

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