That’s totally fine, in my book. There’s always going to be a push and pull as people learn what’s possible. For whatever reason, I read the initial post as asking for a bunch of work that probably would blast through your budget. It was such a mismatch between what I read as your expectation and what I could provide[1] that I skipped over it until you PMed me. Why risk disappointment and frustration?
I’d strongly suggest finding a theme that has the important elements and playing around with that. If you run into problems down the line, maybe use your budget to get some help.
This morning I had a conversation with the contractor who is remodeling our garage. We’ve been working with him for nearly a year and I swear I’ve contradicted myself a hundred times. Things that made sense in the abstract suddenly look wrong when I see them in real life. Today we noticed a funky gap between the stairwell and a wall. It was in the plan and we could have done something about it then. It just wasn’t obvious that there would be a problem until there was a problem.
Part of why we hired a general contractor (and an architect and a structural engineer) is to avoid some of these problems. But they can’t catch everything. Since we are paying them a ton of money to get things right, they fix these little things so that we are happy with the result. I have a friend who owns rental units and he just hires work crews. He’s his own general contractor. It saves him money and he still gets something he’s satisfied with. If something isn’t right, he takes responsibility for it.
Given your budget, your best bet is to hire people for very specific things you can’t do yourself. For instance, if you try the Air theme and want to adjust the way the category boxes are styled and you have specific changes, I’ll bet you can find someone to help.
I’m not a designer, so I’m not going to be much help in any case. But suppose I were an expert. ↩︎