There are certain things in all our lives of which we’re not particularly proud. Family members who skirt the law. Business ventures gone bad. Poor decisions that cost us friends.

In the interest of full disclosure, I want to tell you about a family tragedy of ours, one that is likely to be as shocking to you as it is embarrassing to us: There are nine rooms in our house, and four of them don’t have drapery!

There. I’ve said it. In public. It’s a blight on our family that my wife and I (mostly my wife, actually) have tried to keep to ourselves over the years.

Simply telling you about it makes me feel much better. Of course, I’m not the family member most distressed by this issue; my wife has spent many, many sleepless nights considering what went wrong with our lives to bring us face to face with this situation.

It’s not as if we haven’t had opportunities to rectify the problem. Last year, our two sons attended a summer camp, and those of you with children know how much that can cost. Well, we probably could have purchased and installed drapery on at least one window with that summer camp money, but after much family discussion, we decided to spend the money on our children instead. (It was a tough call, though; it’s certainly possible our sons might have enjoyed new drapes as much as camp.

And there was the time I wanted to buy a big-screen television, reasoning that a TV was something the entire family could enjoy, while the equivalent money invested in custom-designed drapery would only brighten the day of, at most, a room or two. In a secret family ballot, the vote was 3-1 for the TV, and in a magnanimous demonstration of family unity, no one would ever own up to voting for the drapery.

That’s the way many home improvement decisions seem to go: different opinions on different projects of varying costs and priorities.

That’s why we publish this extra Home Design section (pages 9-20) each year, to help you see what other neighbors are doing with their homes and how neighborhood businesses are helping them. You’ll find information about projects big and small, from floor coverings to wireless networking, in this year’s Home Design 2003, which is an extra section in all of our April magazines in Preston Hollow, as well as being distributed in our 200 rack locations throughout the remainder of the year.

Maybe your family makes these decisions more easily and more quickly than mine. Perhaps your family’s darkest secrets aren’t quite as dark as ours.

But who knows? Our secrets might be even darker if we had drapery.