Remodeling will tear us apart

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 19:00:00 +0000

A while ago, I was in the depths of the exhaustion that happens when one’s house is 17 weeks into a remodel, and one has perhaps stupidly decided to stay in that house. In the very back two rooms. Neither my husband nor I was able to bathe, or make ourselves a cup of tea, or figure out where anything was, starting with our winter coats and ending with postage stamps. Worse still, decision fatigue had ground our marital nerve endings into bloody stumps: Brushed stainless or shiny? Round drawer pulls or rectangular? A 10- or 11-inch counter overhang? We stopped bringing each other our morning toast, started snapping orders as we flew out the door to return tile samples or buy paint before starting our real jobs.

As I watched my husband walk away from the house one morning without having even said good morning, I said glumly to our contractor Charlie, “The only thing that will perk me up today is if you come out back at exactly 11:30 and bring me and my writing students chai tea.”

We laughed. It was a joke, after all. This is a guy with strong opinions on grout and hinges, who disappears his underperforming subcontractors overnight with Gadhafi-like efficiency and derives his daytime nutrition from Marlboro cigarettes. Asking Charlie to bring Indian tea to the building out back where I teach creative writing carried the same odds as asking Newt Gingrich to bring us cupcakes.

Salon.com > Lisa Jones

Remodeling will tear us apart