We’re remodeling. It’s not that we planned to remodel. Over the years we had discussed moving walls, or putting new windows in the living room, or replacing a family-room mantel, changes that were fun to talk about, especially because of my private certainty that they would never occur.
You see, I’m married to a carpenter—a real one, one who gets up every morning, dons his carpenter’s sawdusty jeans and T-shirt, gets into his carpenter’s pickup truck and goes off to the ritzier parts of town where he and his crew build fancy things with wood. Believe me, when it comes to working with wood, this husband of mine is a genius. When he puts pieces of wood together, they look like they grew there. (He also has terrific legs and is a great kisser, irrelevant details that I’m including anyway.) Because he does all of this great construction all day long, the odds of his coming home and doing more of it are roughly the same as the odds that I’m going to start baking. From scratch.
Anyway, it happened that I had to live in Utah for a year to do an internship while he stayed in Colorado, holding down the fort. It turns out that he missed me—a lot—which is pretty great after 25 years of marriage. And because I had just the tiniest bit of ambivalence about coming home, he did what any right-thinking carpenter would do: He decided to entice me by making our perfectly adequate home a really great place.
He tore out the walls between the kitchen and living room, which of course required ripping down the wallpaper and paneling and mantels and woodwork and light fixtures in both rooms. This process, of course, required moving furniture, books, lamps, dishes, pictures and about a zillion antique doodads and mementos into our bedroom, my study, the basement, the laundry room and the garage.
When I’m feeling calm and loving, I am able to admit that he honestly believed he would have it all done before my return and that he wanted to surprise me with a home that had the open, airy look I’ve always admired. Unfortunately, he forgot that this amount of work can’t possibly be done in the ten days he allowed himself before my return. When I got home, I was surprised all right, never expecting to be welcomed back to what most closely resembled Dresden after the bombing.
I’ve been home now for two months. As I write this, I am sitting at my desk in my study. The ironing board hovers within inches of my left shoulder. On it are my favorite silk shirt and an upended box of finish nails. The chair in the corner is buried beneath a mountain of clothes that have been removed from the closet where the attic access door is. They’ve been there for over a month, but there’s no sense putting them back because the electrician will be here any week now, and he will need to get into the attic. A thin layer of drywall dust coats everything in the house, including me. Two bathrooms are currently out of commission (it’s a little-known fact that remodeling, no matter where in the house it occurs, just upsets the dickens out of the plumbing). I’m afraid to turn on the light in the kitchen unless I’m wearing shoes that will ground me from electrical shock. There’s a hole in the hallway where a cold-air return will someday be. The carpeting wasn’t in great shape to start with, and now it is freckled with paint, golden oak stain and what I suspect is beer. There’s an air compressor the size of a steer in the living room, and it hasn’t been moved an inch in the past month.
I suggest calling a painter, a plumber, a drywaller, a carpet layer. But when you’re a carpenter, you don’t do that. You do it yourself. And if worse comes to worst, you call your buddies in the business, who will be happy to help (as soon as they get their own home projects wrapped up).
A friend suggests that I move to a hotel until the work is done. She doesn’t realize that a lottery jackpot wouldn’t cover that bill. When you are married to a carpenter, remodeling is measured in months and even years, not in days and weeks.
My husband is watching a soccer game on TV. He swears he will get everything done soon. By Easter. Summer at the outside. Unless, of course, we have any unexpected expenses in the next eight or ten months that deplete the remodeling fund. And even if that occurs, he’ll get it done by Christmas when our daughter’s new in-laws will arrive from New Zealand for a visit. I can’t seem to shake the image of all of us getting acquainted while perched on 5-gal. paint buckets. I would be mortified except that her father-in-law is—guess what?—a carpenter. Her in-laws will understand.
—Lynne Kinghorn, Denver, Colorado
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