Renovating, as the trend masters would say, is the new procreating. Like making babies, it involves plenty of tears and wailing, and then you’re stuck with the results for the next 20 years. David Leach recently went through a reno. Here’s what happened…
The phone buzzed at my girlfriend’s office. On the line was a stranger at the peak of a manic episode.
“Jeanine!” he shouted. “Jeanine, it’s me!” In the background, it seemed, someone was herding rhinos. “I’m at your house and I’m tearing down walls!”
Now, this is a boast you hope never to hear on a Monday morning between your first and second cups of coffee. But the breathless voice on the crackly cellphone, my girlfriend soon realized, belonged to the contractor we had just hired to renovate our house. She still had cause for confusion, though:
- My girlfriend’s name is Jenny, not Jeanine.
- Our contractor was supposed to start work the next day.
- And perhaps most importantly, we hadn’t actually told him which walls we wanted knocked down.
•••
Owning your first home is, by any measure, the ultimate adult freedom. It looses you from the judgement of parents and landlords. It silences the complaints of nosy neighbours and fussy roommates in balsa-walled rental units. You are elevated, at last, to lord and lady of the manor, and your word is the law. You can crank the stereo to 11 whenever you please. You can indulge in rowdy all-night sex like caged weasels. (Actually, Jenny and I could do neither because we’d bought a duplex.)
But best of all, you have the freedom to act like kids again. You get to play house on the largest scale possible—in the Barbie mansion of every girl’s dreams, in the mother of all boyhood tree forts, one that’s begging to be remade in your image. The only limits to your remodelling are good sense and the spectre of eternal debt. And both are easily repressed.
Renovating, as the trend masters would say, is the new procreating. And like making babies, it involves plenty of tears and wailing, and then you’re stuck with the results for the next 20 years. Blame it on the cable makeover programs: Home-porn versions of the reno life, like Trading Spaces and While You Were Out, rarely show any real sweat or suffering. One of you flirts with the perky, blonde decor babe, the other bats eyelids at the rakish boy toy with the low-slung tool belt. An hour of sly banter, slapdash painting and the occasional pounding of a nail transform your house or condo from dull generica into a hipster’s paradise. And then you move on to something new (organic gardening! Exotic pets! Feng shui!) after the commercial break.
Yeah, right. In reality, reno’ing your home is the closest that most middle-class Canadian couples will ever come to living in a war zone. Craters suddenly appear in your lawn, gaping holes in the floors. An entire side of your house goes AWOL and is draped in cheap plastic for weeks. At any hour of the day, unshaven men in sooty uniforms march through your door, shouldering jagged-toothed instruments of mass destruction. In a midnight panic, you consider fleeing like refugees to live with the in-laws. Yes, it gets that bad.
•••
But after Jenny and I ponied up for our first house, we found ourselves in a fix—or rather, what real-estate shysters call a “fixer-upper,” which must also be the street name for the medication that blunts the trauma of renovating.
Like many couples, we were forced to perform immediate and drastic domestic triage. So we drew up a three-column list: Down one column, the major renovations that would eventually turn a 90-year-old flophouse into our modern dream home. Down the next, the minor touch-ups needed before we’d let other human beings even come to visit. Down column three, the must-dos that might keep the place from falling around our ankles like an old pair of track pants.
And then we met the estimators.
