Facebook just fed me a memory from five years ago. It was a picture of my kitchen undergoing renovations. The cabinet doors were off. The tile splashguard had been removed, exposing a swath of bare, unpainted wall. The counter was littered with random tools and hills of sawdust.
I showed the picture to my husband, who almost passed out. In the time since launching that renovation project and now, we have sold that house, built another house from the ground up, sold that house, bought another house, and are in the midst of a kitchen renovation that is, at its current stage, eerily identical to the one on Facebook.
Thanks Facebook, for reminding us who we really are: two people who can’t live somewhere over the span of a gnat’s life without ripping out what’s perfectly functional or otherwise abandoning the place completely.
The thing is, I don’t even feel all that dissatisfied with my digs prior to embarking on the renovations – or moves – that yank precious hunks of time out from under my days. It’s just a thing my husband and I do, much like an art project. Because once we see possibilities, we can’t unsee them. We have to make them a reality.
Or maybe that’s not it at all. Repeated home renovation might be, like overindulgence in plastic surgery, a way for my husband and me to deny a certain finality. After all, once you have bought the house, moved into the house, unpacked the boxes, put the wooden goat on the dining room table and hung the painting of the snarling dog, what’s left to do except sit on the new gold velvet sofa you bought for the new parlor and stare at the person to whom you have been married since before you yourselves needed renovations?