Home Improvement

        It was two days before Thanksgiving. Two days before our house was supposed to be filled with family, delicious smells of turkey and pumpkin pie, and tasteful autumn decorations. Right then, though, our house was filled with tile guys chatting in Spanish, a painter putting the first coat on the kitchen trim, a plumber fixing the leaking refrigerator, and a furnace repair man draining all the radiators. With food shopping, baking, bed-making, and house-prepping to do, I marched around grimly, feather-duster in hand, wiping away tile dust that would be replaced with dropcloth dust the next moment. What is that old line about doing something over and over even though you know it’s futile?

The dining room the day before Thanksgiving.

The kitchen.

The driveway -- not our Thanksgiving company.

Ah, home improvement. Our last project was having the basement painted and retiled. Although it took weeks, we were mostly undisturbed, since the work took place on a floor we didn’t really need. Somehow, I imagined that the kitchen would be the same. I didn’t even consider, until the night before the work was to start, that I probably wouldn’t be able to get to the refrigerator or stove. I should have been wiser; they were both unplugged for the better part of two weeks. I learned three important lessons from this latest project, all of which should have been obvious and are doubtless well-known to all home improvement veterans.

The Time Factor: The actual length of any home-improvement project can be found by multiplying the contractor’s estimate by 9/5 and dividing by the square root of 2. Or, if that math is too much work, just take what the contractor says and add SEVERAL MORE DAYS (weeks, for a long project). Thus, when Juan told me that his guys could certainly finish our kitchen floor a good week before Thanksgiving, I should have known that it would take a miracle to get the project done by the day itself.

The Money Factor: We are blessed with a contractor who has tended, so far, to be both honest and accurate. That does not mean, however, that his estimate of the cost of a project is anything like what we will actually spend. I never considered the extra heating costs when people are going in and out constantly, nor the extra cost in Swiffer and Mr. Clean products for cleaning up afterward. Not to mention the fact that we had to eat out twice a day for a week. (The hospital bills incurred by our poor nutrition over that time are yet to come.)

Both of these factors, however, are negligible compared to lesson number three, which we will call

The Stress Factor: The workers who invaded our house were very nice. They didn’t play loud music, even though I told them it was okay. They didn’t drink our coffee, even though I offered. They didn’t have annoying conversations -- not ones I could understand, anyway. They didn’t track unnecessary dirt on the carpet. They did their work well. But for days on end, they were there, right in the middle of the kitchen. The most stressful part of the stressful situation is that I kept remembering that the whole thing was entirely self-inflicted. Voluntary. One hundred percent my own fault. 

When I lived in Geneva, my friend and I would snark about the American fixation on home ownership and home improvement, and how boring everyone was with all their talk of new carpet and new countertops. Be careful what you snark about. I had not been on American soil for a month before I was in it with the worst of them. What is this obsession with enhancement? 

According to an HGTV poll, 61 percent of Americans would prefer to spend money on their home than on a vacation. The Globe and Mail posits that an infatuation with decorating may reveal self-image problems: People see their homes as an extension of themselves, and it may be easier to control the look of our home than the look of our aging bodies. An article in the Economist suggests that the American dream of home ownership has become a controlling obsession, and that for many people, owning a home may not be the best option.

In Europe, lots of people rent. We didn’t mind renting there. It is relaxing to not be ultimately responsible for a place. If the refrigerator is leaking, someone else will take care of fixing it -- and take care of the bill. On the other hand, there is something about investing time, money, and thought into a house that personalizes it. It doesn’t matter if it’s paint on a wall or an entirely new kitchen, the point is that improving a house makes it yours. We can look at this as a shallow and materialistic desire to have more, newer, and fancier stuff, and that may certainly be part of it. On the other hand, isn’t the drive to create and beautify part of what it means to be made in God’s image? 

Thinking so sure makes me feel better about the new kitchen floor.