A few home improvements have been
pending since we bought our first house four years ago and realized
we didn't have a landlord to take care of us anymore. The jobs had
accumulated—badly-needed wallpaper
removal, some proper light fixtures, some curtains and blinds, and a coat
of fresh paint.
My husband and I are not home reno
types. We're proud of ourselves if we manage to vacuum the carpet or
rake leaves.
We weren't always so negligent. When my husband
and I met 10 years ago, he had built a rooftop deck for his apartment
and I had just finished painting my whole apartment—in two days,
ceilings included. We thought we were capable people.
Then the kids came along.
Now we can barely keep one room tidy, let alone make time for home improvements. At almost any hour, you will find dishes in our kitchen sink. The main floor dining table is a repository for bills. On the
coffee table, books and the week's newspapers pile up. I keep collecting them, in denial of the fact that I don't actually read anymore. In the basement, toys lay strewn about like shrapnel after a
mess explosion.
I never thought anyone but us would care, but I was wrong.
“I love you guys,” one of our
neighbors said dryly. She's renovating her three-storey from top to
bottom. “You moved in and didn't do a thing.”
Hers wasn't the only back-handed
compliment. Friends who visited often remarked, “Nice
place! There's so much potential!”
When our mailman confessed he was concerned he might step on the wrong spot of our front steps and end up with a two-by-four in the face, we finally got the message. Time to suffer through renos like all the other grown-ups we know.
I'm sure what those other grown-ups wanted was for me to taste that bitter regret you have when you can only access your house from the back door, your furniture is pulled away from the
walls, your house is covered in the fine, powdery dust leftover after
drywall repair and painting, your bank account is dwindling, you and your spouse aren't speaking to each other anymore, and all the stuff that's usually kept in
cupboards and on shelves is sitting in the middle of your living room.
The inconvenience of it all makes you wonder: What was so wrong with some peeling wallpaper in the first place? And couldn't the mailman figure out how to get around that bad stair? Couldn't he see the slapstick hilarity of getting a two-by-four in the face?
By the
standards of middle-class Toronto housewives, last month was only mildly trying. We did not, as many do, relocate our
family to a cramped apartment and learn how most of Toronto actually lives, all while borrowing the equivalent of our life savings to finance a gut job. We merely had our deck fixed, painted the walls, pulled up a bit of carpet, and
installed some new light fixtures.
It did render us semi-homeless for a while though, and momentarily broke, as we paid out tradespeople. And it wasn't fun keeping the kids out from morning to night, dragging them from to one time-killing activity after another as
we tried to avoid things like our son getting naked and leaning
against freshly-painted trim or our daughter finger-painting on the floor with a mixture of drywall dust and milk (both of which did eventually happen).
Though it is dusty and in disarray, our house does look a little better.
More importantly, however, I lost weight. Just a little bit but a couple of people noticed. Turns out even minor renovations are
terrible for keeping regular meal times and eating in general. I missed
breakfast every day for two weeks, and was running about so much that I
forgot to do my usual furtive eating between meals. I lost a
pound-and-a-half without even trying.
As the Italians say: Since the house is
on fire, at least we can warm ourselves.
