Renovations – how hard can it be?

 
So this past week, I wondered if it might be possible to divorce myself.

I have this symptom which is likely a by-product of being diagnosed with a change addiction that regularly rears its head and it’s called the ‘how hard can it be’ syndrome. 

Perhaps some of you also suffer from this and usually you find out in the middle of a ‘little’ experiment that it appears to be a ‘little harder than anticipated’ when you are in way to deep to undo what has already been done and rethink the process. 

A conclusion that was drawn when my kitchen was so dirty it looked like the sand dunes of Namibia due to the high levels of saw dust that had seeped into every nook and cranny and was now definitely not fit for food preparation of any sorts and the kettle needed to be unearthed by qualified archaeologists and sterilised before every usage.  And the ankle deep sawdust in the upstairs bathroom, which was before all my bright ideas once cream in colour, now needed industrial equipment for a full on evacuation and removal operation, not to mention the state of the rooms actually undergoing renovations. 

And I wondered to myself if this might be a good time to move. 

Because if it were anyone besides myself turning my house into that sort of state, it would be definitely grounds for divorce or at minimum a prolonged stay at a nearby hotel, alone. 

Except I was the problem in this case and one can hardly run away from oneself albeit, I am sure many have tried. 

My daughter must have been in the process of Googling ‘how to replace your mom’ or ‘ways to put your mother on Ritalin without her knowing’.  I cannot help but wonder if the rights of children are regularly violated due to the genetic lotto that all children are subjected to because they are simply not in a position to trade in their parents; poor things.            

See the story is simple, it happened when I found out that the company would not be paying my agreed salary (that is another blog, once I have found the amusement in that), and I concluded that the carpet in some of the rooms might be contributing toward some of the ill health we have been experiencing the past few months and so decided to pull it out and put in a hardwood floor.

I mean, how hard can it be? 

Well for starters it was the carpet’s intention to be a permanent fixture in the house, installed back in the days when things were done properly to industrial proportions.  Aside from the glue that securely ensured that a portion of the screed underneath came with it, the underlay, due to simple touch, released a cloud of something that resembled pictures of biological warfare they show to primary school children.  So armed with a dust mask and gloves, I went to battle.  A few hours in, I took to calling in reinforcements all of whom were currently and conveniently unavailable.  Which is what tends to happen when you do not have a spouse of your own that you can persuasively convince to do your dirty work and have to rely on a borrowed muscle power every now and then.          

A few hours later, nearly suffering from excess exhaustion, the carpet was on its way out the door.  But the door in my house is of course, as anticipated, not conveniently located.  It is through the hallway, down the stairs into the dining room, through the entrance hall and out the front door.  A process which in an open plan house, has just spread a cloud of hazardess dust through every single room in the house; an airborne haze which took a good couple of hours to settle.   

And underneath the carpet, was a bright pink chemical stain.  More than ten years old, it still had the ability to colour plaster that was smeared over top of it and come to the surface.  It is scary what you can find in the process of undergoing renovations; a stain which in the state of my exhaustion brought on a highly destabilised emotional state; a stain which has been subsequently chipped out of the screed and removed.        

I then proceeded to bleach floors, swear at the smell and the glue scraping process, purchase bamboo flooring, swear at the price, put underlay, swear at the inability of it to lay flat, trim door frames, swear at broken blades in power tools, cut floor boards,  swear at the lack of tools in my house that are needed for this job, purchase tools, swear at the project creep as a result, use my kitchen counter as a work bench and cut it too, swear, nail in base boards and hit my fingers a few times, swear, varnish base boards, spill varnish, swear...  

I am sure you get the picture.  

I am still not finished with the work... but am now at least hoping that the room is dust and toxin free and our health can improve.

And so now while I am tackling the mountains of sawdust still in the upstairs bathroom to see if the cream colour of the bathroom is still intact after hours of the much needed excavation operation, I promise to convince myself that next time I ask the question of how hard can it be, I will explore the possibility that the answer to the question just might be; ‘damn difficult’, and not allow the gleaming new bamboo floor lure me into any future illusions about the process and potential of renovations. 

But once the dirt is gone... there are just no guarantees... that the change addict will remember any lessons learned. 

And who will wait just long enough to forget the process a little before she begins again ‘cause that bamboo floor looks sooo shiny... 

And like a crow that is attracted to shiny things, the shine with eventually win out.

 ‘Shiny.’ ‘Damn difficult.’ ‘Shiny.’ ‘Damn difficult.’ ‘Shiny.’ ‘Damn difficult.’ ‘Shiny’. ‘Difficult’. ‘Damn shiny.’  ‘Difficult.’  ‘Damn shiny.’  ‘Damn Shiny.’  ‘Damn Shiny.’   

That is what it means to be a true change addict.