Fixer Downer

I experienced a very dark time after the birth of my first child. Post partum depression sunk me like a rock in water, and for months I didn’t think I’d ever wash to shore. But I felt so triumphant when I finally did return because I felt stronger than ever. I knew if I experienced another dark time, I would come at it as a much stronger person, with a reserve of knowledge and wisdom.

Well, that time has come.

You see, people go into home renovations with the same delusional optimism of people going into parenthood. They convince themselves that the horror stories of others will never be their horror stories. No, no, our child will sleep. Our child won’t always follow me into the bathroom. Our child will be well behaved. And similarly, our contractor comes highly recommended, our renovation is a simple project, our contractor promises to stay on time and on budget.

Likewise, homeowners give advice about home renovations with the same heart-felt unhelpfulness of people a few years into parenthood. They convince themselves you’ve never thought of the advice with which they are about to grace you. Oh, so the baby’s mouth needs to go around the nipple? Got it. No, I never have tried holding my baby in a different position. Is dangling her by her feet not recommended? And similarly with renovations: No, we never considered just asking them how much longer they will be. And yes, we will totally try your guy next time.

Much like those new parents you see, walking zombies wondering if they will ever get their lives back, so are those people in the middle of a home update. I can safely say, the Morgans currently look and feel worse than our early days of parenting.

It started with a leak. A small drip at first, just a tiny pin prick in the ceiling of our kitchen, which is directly below our family bathroom. A few days later, as I was gathering snacks from the fridge for a family car trip, I felt a gush of water pour down on me from the ceiling fan above.

Sometimes you don’t want to update your home. Sometimes you have to.

We knew we could no longer use the tub in the upstairs bathroom, and it’s the only tub in the house. This meant that until we could get the bathroom fixed, we would need to shower in the basement.

Now, we are fortunate to have a finished basement that has a full bathroom, including a large vanity, sink, toilet, and a walk-in shower. But in case your mind has fixed on an image of a shower one might find in an upscale hotel, let me be clear. This shower stall is roughly one foot by one foot in diameter. There is a small shelf, perhaps the size of a deck of cards, reserved for shampoo bottles. No normal bottle will stay on the shelf, of course, so it’s necessary to purchase a large quantity of travel size bottles and stack them in a row using the same physics as a waiter carrying plates at a Mexican restaurant. With every reach of a bottle, two or three will fall to the base of the shower, and the process will repeat itself the more you try to reshelve. But take heart, there’s a luxury shower head, positioned at the neck line, that has two settings: Sputter and Skin Rip.

To clean my children, I simply put one at a time in the stall, turn the water on, keep the stall door open and allow myself to become drenched as I lean over the threshold and scrub them down. Luckily, both kids react to soap in their eyes, the spittle of water, the claustrophobia, and the bottles falling continually around them with the same measured temperament they do after a long day at the zoo.

Eventually, four weeks later, the project started. And it started strong. Demo went better than I expected. Mostly because with old homes such as ours, I always expect there to be human remains, or prohibition liquor, stored behind the lath and plaster. Or for the contactor to stand back, assess the inside of the walls and say, “Yep, the whole house has to come down.” Luckily, none of those scenarios played out.

I wanted to salvage much of the vintage charm, including the original cast iron tub. But, as was pointed out to me, the vintage charm was making it rain in my kitchen. It took a team of six men, and a saw, to break the thing apart and get it down the stairs.

With the strong start of the demolition, I assumed momentum would remain. But like thinking child birth would be easy just because I had an easy pregnancy, this was a false sense of security.

Sure enough, I was told the tile was on backorder and nothing could move forward without the tile. So we waited. And we waited. It was unclear to me why we were waiting, because I picked the most basic of tile, and saw heaps of it at the local hardware store, but far be it for me to question the process.

Eventually, the tile arrived. And when the contractor brought the tile guy in, he took one look at the sub floor, shook his head and said, “I cannot and will not work under these conditions.” And he walked out of my house, got into his truck, and drove away.

My contractor shrugged.

When a second tile guy was brought on the scene—one with reassuring confidence—he said the conditions weren’t ideal but he could make it so. And he spoke about the 17 easy steps he would take to get the subfloor just right. This sounded the same to me as when my mom tries to verbally explain a recipe. But like my mother, the tile guy managed to orchestrate ingredients into something wonderful, fixing whatever problem existed, and pretty soon he was tiling and singing away to Nirvana.

School had officially ended for my oldest and she came home saying she really wanted to take a shower. This relieved me, but only momentarily. When I asked why she wanted to step into the upright water coffin, she said her head had been itchy all day.

I’ll say this, when a child has tremendously curly hair like hers, it’s hard to spot those sonsabitches until you get deep within the curls. But there they were: a beautiful colony of lice. So that evening, I spent several hours, hunched over the threshold of the shower stall, scrubbing each girl in RID (travel size) while Jim burned all our sheets.

In the fifth week of our 10-day project, we found our house key had been accidentally left in the lock. A few days later, after giving it back to the contractors, it was mistakenly left in the deadbolt yet again. Perhaps it was just the lice, but Jim and I felt a bit itchy about that and decided to call a locksmith to re-key our house. On a Friday evening.

And just this week—as we seem to both be getting closer to the end, and seeing no end in sight—a rock from a lawn mower came up and hit our full glass screen door, shattering it instantly. As I bent down on my hands and knees, sweeping up thousands of shards of glass, hearing the table saw whirring in my front yard, and the swish of sanding upstairs in the bathroom, I felt that feeling I hadn’t felt since my first child was born.

I remember how I came to the conclusion that I needed to seek help for the post partum depression. I woke up one morning and everything was going well. The weather was nice and the baby was in a great mood. I’d even had a really good night’s sleep. Despite all the positives, I knew that no matter what we did that day, I didn’t want to be around any other people. And I certainly didn’t want anyone to come over to my house. No matter how good things were seemingly going, I still didn’t want to interact with anyone. I felt scared and alone, which made me avoid seeing other people. I had closed up my house and closed off myself.

And that’s how I know I’m in a bit of a dark place again. Not just because my children had lice, my house had to be re-keyed, and my newly potty-trained three-year-old has to traipse up and down the stairs to pee. And it’s not just because there has been an endless parade of workers in my house for the past seven weeks, constant noise, and shuffling of our work schedules to accommodate the progress. And not just because my glass door was shattered, the bottles won’t balance on the shelf, and certainly not just because my tile was f**king backordered.

But mostly because right now, I would give anything to be alone in my house.