On home improvement projects (crucial rooms!)
Our downstairs bathroom has had problems for quite a while — six or seven years ago, we had a minor flood, which damaged the floor and caused several ceramic tiles to come loose. Of course, those tiles were no longer made, so I couldn’t just replace the things. We pretty much ignored the situation until six months ago, when one of the family put her foot through the floor. Now, I know that there are some home repairs that I’m just not capable of doing well — I don’t have enough obscenities in my vocabulary to tackle certain tasks, and laying a new subfloor for ceramic tile (with those heavy concrete-laced panels) is one of them. So I hired someone to do that job, and meanwhile had Katie figure out what kind of tile pattern would look good and be appropriate for the period of the house. We decided on a pattern, I gutted the bathroom in late April, and the handyman guy laid the new subfloor. And then we discovered the problem with our tile pattern: it was made up of 2″ tiles, and we had to place each of some 2000 of the things one tile at a time, paying close attention to the pattern to make sure it came out right. This process took quite a while — the bathroom wasn’t really usable again until early June. By the way, did I mention that our downstairs bathroom is the guest bathroom? That it has the only shower stall in the house? We have a bathtub, but if you’re a shower person, you get kind of desperate for a shower after a while. Well, I’d like to announce that after six weeks of single bathroom showerless life, the Mendelsohn household has a newly tiled, bathroom. We still have to finish the mouldings, and we need to replace the door (we’re using a curtain to meet the demands of modesty), but the room is functional. Once we finish the last bit of work, I’m tempted to have celebratory event of some sort…
By the way, lengthy home improvement projects are ordinarily a recipe for low-level strife in the Mendelsohn household. Everybody gets out of sorts, arguments happen, and members of the household, particularly husband and wife, end up saying things we later regret. We actually got through this project without it being a cause for sin. Sure, we disagreed on how to proceed from time to time, but even with all the unplanned-for challenges, life went pretty well during the course of the project (other than the lack of sleep — we stayed up really late almost every night that we were working on the floor to make sure that the room would be functional by the time Sam came home from Ireland).
July 26th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
In a way home improvement projects are like growing in the Lord. We’d like to grow smoothly and easily from baby Christians to maturity, but like owning a house, it doesn’t work that way. Festering problems crop up that we didn’t even have a clue about. We think we know what needs to happen, and then we get surprised when related problems crop up. We think we’ve got something fixed, and then that sewer keeps backing up. And all the time we’d like it all to look nice on the outside so no one guesses at the mess inside. Still, with work and grace things do improve both in our lives and our homes.