Passing Down German Heritage

The six inches of my snag list.

Six inches of trim are missing from the step down to our kitchen. I renovated that hallway a few years ago, and went the full nine yards (technically 20-odd yards with the stairs). Ripped out, replastered, retrimmed, and recarpeted throughout. If I say so myself, it came out respectable.

 
Every part of it except one last short run, where I ran out of trim and never looked back. The offcut I needed was too small to justify a whole new length, and making one from scratch is the kind of job that is entirely doable and entirely annoying.

A past life in the building trades made me handy, which is useful. It puts a helpfully realistic lens over the “yeah, I can do that” confidence that arrives every time I open Pinterest (which has never once had to finish one of its own ideas).
 
Unhelpfully, it also left me with a snag list mentality. On any project of real size there is a running list of small things, the snags, that never quite get in the way of calling the whole thing livably done.
 
That gap is a snag. I walk past it multiple times every day, and it taunts me with the same question every time, “Is it worth fixing?” Yes, obviously it is worth fixing. It's also six inches of trim with a longer to-do list queued up behind it, so it waits.
 
Our German heritage has a snag list too, and it took me a while to see it as one. The small moments are the snags. They are the bedtime story about where the photo on the shelf was taken, or a German word for the thing already on the dinner table. 
 
Each one feels like that strip of missing trim. Small, easily skippable, and the kind of thing I look past on an evening that already has plenty of other things competing for attention.
 
A while ago I went looking for whether any of this holds up, or whether the urge to pass it down was just my own inherited homesickness wearing a parenting costume.
 
The brief summary is that it is worth the effort, though not in the way most parents reach for at first. The research is unexpectedly specific about where the effort starts (and stops) paying off.
 
→ Is passing down German heritage worth the effort?
 
The trim is still missing, but it will get done the way the hallway got done. One annoying job at a time, and never the whole list at once.
 
Heritage works the same way. I stopped trying so hard and went little-and-often instead, which is currently the only reason any of it is getting done at all.