- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - Hier 06:10

House and horror

The house. The house. Oh my God, this house. A mere two columns ago I alerted you to certain domestic traumas lurking in my near future. I look back on that time fondly. The time of getting the picture of what needed to be done and how and by whom. And when would it all be over. Ah, those halcyon days when my only real problem was dust. I am now at a stage when I consider myself lucky if I can find two spoons and a mop. I have leftover blickness about a household renovation that happened during the time I was doing my A’ Levels. My father conspired to have almost every room in the house stripped, sawed in half, or sprinkled with fairy dust all at the same time. I will not pretend to know how my siblings coped. This was survival of the selfest. And “myself” comprised my mother and I. Curiously, the father left the living room untouched and there my mother and I camped every night for about a hundred years. I was left with an eternal respect for rugs and duvets. It should not be possible to work on one thing in a confined area and yet somehow find everything compromised. Things are so drastic I’ve had to start wearing shoes. Indoors, no less. The cats who are not orange are now orange. The cats who are orange are oranger. The Cats’ Father and I are both taking on unnatural hues. We’re ready to start giving lectures on the esoteric elements of being neither red nor yellow. In order to work on one room, everything from everywhere has had to be moved to safe zones where they are piled on top of the things that first went into hiding. Some of the floorspace is completely bare (to make room for orange mud). The rest is covered in boxes, bags and laundry hampers. The beds are similarly afflicted. And the boxes et al are covered with more boxes. Who makes these plans? All is not lost. (At least, I hope not. How would I know? Heaven knows when I’ll be able to find my second-best penknife.) There is nowhere any exercise or yoga can take place. I never say “no” to no exercise. No healthy cooking can be done under such circumstances so I am forced to live on Royal Castle and cake. I have abandoned the care of plants, and, as I long suspected, they do so much better without me. I no longer wake up terrified and weeping in the middle of the night because I was dreaming about the house turning into cheese or that all my kitchenware had vanished and been replaced by Vicks inhalers. Yes. I’m definitely doing better. I believe this is called adapting. Or a form of Stockholm syndrome. I know I need help and I’m not afraid to admit it. This, I said to myself, calls for serious professional aid. Yet the fact that one site told me I should consider therapy during these trying times only filled me with dread. “There’s no white-knuckle ride quite like a renovation project,” says Eleanor Cording-Booth in the introduction to House and Garden’s Things I wish I'd known before I started a house renovation. This is not advice but a simple truth. I may stick this up on the door as a reminder of where I am in life. By and large, none of the H&G’s advice was properly useful to me or anyone I know. It did make me feel a little bit like I was part of a community of the besieged and beleaguered, all dragging our dusty feet from one time-consuming bad idea to another. Or running around madly trying not to rouse the ire of they who do the digging and cupboarding and painting. The interviewees said irksome things like “try to to be kind to each other.” The mental health side of home renovations is serious business. I thought everything would be about budgets and schedules – and those were there too – but I had no expectation of genuine interest in not yielding to all-out family wars or neglected work, children and pets. In so many ways, a reno is a worst-case scenario for many. Here you are faced with a number of connected tasks you can’t do yourself. You are at the mercy of others. Things can and will go wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it. Maybe being kind to your fellow travellers on this journey really is the best you can do. The post House and horror appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.