Open House

by Jane Christmas

  When I go and check his work, I find that he has put on all the doors except two: the bathroom doors.

  Three days later, the bathroom doors are up, but he forgets to install the jambs. Or he puts a catch plate on one door and neglects to install its lock. He calls out that he is running to the hardware store to get supplies, but when he returns, he never has what he set out to pick up.

  WE ARE NOT THE ONLY ONES frustrated by Francis. As each trade trickles back to put the finishing touches on their work, we discover that everyone to a man is fed up with Francis. A support group might be needed to deal with their complaints.

  A few days after we have moved in, Cyryl, the painter, arrives. He had already painted the kitchen before we moved in, but given that Francis was rejigging the cabinets up until the final hour, Cyryl offers to do touch-ups. “In normal procedure you put up kitchen then paint,” he grumbles.

  Elsewhere, we clear small areas, shuffling piles of boxes and stacking furniture from one corner to another or moving stuff into the backyard so that he can paint the living room. We repeat this, multiple times, in every room in the house, though Cyryl tells us not to, that he is happy to move things. But we cannot help helping. He has a number of other clients scheduled, and the delay on our project has put them all into backed-up mode.

  Today, he and I are sitting on the hall steps sipping coffee, commiserating about the work ahead for both of us.

  “How much you pay for this?”

  At first, I think he is asking how much we paid for the house. Or does he mean the renovations? Then I get it: he means how much did we pay for his services.

  I tell him what Francis quoted me. I want to ask him to justify his fee, but at the mention of the quote he nearly chokes on his coffee.

  “Two thousand five hundred?”

  “Isn’t that what you charge?”

  “I tell Francis fifteen hundred. For entire house!”

  “He told us two thousand five hundred for two rooms and the hall.”

  “I never work for him again,” harrumphs Cyryl. “Next time you need painter you call me direct. No Francis.”

  Francis was right about Cyryl’s work, though. It is nothing short of astonishing. It is not so much what he does to the walls, it is the magic he applies to the woodwork and the cornice mouldings. I thought I would have to bring in a plasterer to smooth the battered mouldings, but Cyryl has a bag of tricks that fills in missing bits and makes everything look new.

  I am embarrassed by the painting The Husband and I have done in the bedrooms, particularly on the master bedroom ceiling. Cyryl has noticed it. I have caught him peeking into the room and grimacing at the sight of it. I tell him we were trying to save money, so it was one of the rooms we did not have plastered. But now the flaws in the ceiling have revealed themselves, especially on a patch that is resistant to paint because the old plaster has lost its key.

  “When you lie in bed, you will see bad ceiling and it will make you angry. Let me fix.”

  Within the hour he has smoothed the rough edges and cured the paint-resistant section. It looks amazing.

  Cyryl is not the only one who feels screwed by Francis.

  Paul, the plumber, is furious, too. He arrives one evening to fix the bathroom sink and ends up having to take apart Francis’s work. I sit on the toilet and chat with him while he works.

  Paul, lying on his side on the floor, a free hand wrapped around a J trap, finally says, “May I ask why you waited so long for the bathroom to be done?”

  The question startles me.

  “Us? We were waiting for you. Francis said you were away, or that you did not have time because you had just had a baby.”

  Paul’s head bangs against the bathroom vanity. “That’s not true!” he says. “We were all set to do the bathroom in July, but Francis said you guys were not ready.”

  “What? The bathroom was the first thing we wanted done! We had all the pieces here by the end of June, waiting to be installed. He kept saying that people were away.”

  “Bullshit. We were ready. We begged him to let us get on with it, but he said you didn’t want anyone back for a while. It didn’t make sense. There’s something wrong with that guy. I’m never working with him again.”

  “He mentioned that he had had a breakdown.”

  “He can’t handle a full project on his own. Seriously, he does good work, but he needs people directing him.”

  “He told us that he was a project manager, that he still does it on the side.”

  “Don’t believe a word of it. The guy can’t organize breakfast, let alone a full-scale project.”

  “But he did your house.”

  “He did not do our house.”

  “He took us to your house and showed us your kitchen. He said he had done it. We hired him on the basis of how your house looked.”

  Paul forces himself to put down his tools calmly. He looks me straight in the eye.

  “Are you serious? He took you into our home?”

  Yup.

  He takes a slow breath through his nose. “He did the demolition at the back of our kitchen. That is all.”

  “He took us up to your bathroom and said he did that, too.”

  Another deep breath. “Nope, he didn’t do that, either. I did that with my brother-in-law and my dad.”

  We are very familiar with Paul’s brother-in-law and father: his brother-in-law is Charlie, our plasterer; his father is Jasper, the retired firefighter who Francis told us was the kitchen fitter.

  If Paul’s anger is rising, so is mine, but who would I blame? We hired someone who had shown us work he insisted he had done.

  “We only kept coming back because of you and your husband,” says Paul. “We like you guys, and we saw that Francis was screwing you over.”

  Cyryl has said the same thing to us, and it is humbling. All that tea making The Husband did has paid huge dividends.

  AS WE ADAPT TO OUR NEW HOME, a glaring flaw presents itself: The Husband cannot find a café in our neighbourhood that opens before nine o’clock in the morning.

  “There has to be one close by,” I say. There are three within a five-minute walk of our house.

  “Nope. Checked them all. None of them open before nine.”

  He takes his cappuccino at seven—seven thirty tops. This is a man with a routine. He has taken to leaving the house and making the fifteen-minute drive back to Longwell Green so he can go to Costa or Caffè Nero in the retail park. We did not move to an urban area so that we could drive to cafés in suburbia.

  The poor guy looks on the verge of a breakdown, and it is not due to the lack of an early-morning café. The stress of the reno and the move, my fessing up about going over budget, has sent him to the brink. I try to show enthusiasm for what has been done so that he can find pleasure in all the pain, but he only sees dust and debt.

  The project has sapped me, too. There is no better indicator than a renovation to show how much the body ages between forty and sixty. Agility and foresight are on a downward trajectory.

  It has been nearly twenty years since I last did any hard work on a home. I can plan and envision and make decisions, but in terms of physical work, well, I am shocked at how unsteady I have become on a ladder (I will not even touch on the matter of bravery and heights). How do we change so incrementally and yet so fulsomely? Then again, I must also acknowledge my ignorance: I have not kept pace with the tools of the trade. Everyone uses cordless tools; I am still using Jurassic-period screwdrivers and hammers. I should ask for a nail gun for Christmas. But then, it is not solely about the tools; it is about my ability.

  This renovation has not improved my confidence about doing even small jobs. I need to put up a curtain rod in the guest room: I have everything for the job—tools and materials—but the metal curtain rod I want to use has to be cut. In my previous life I would have measured, marked the cutline with a pencil, then taken a saw to it without a second thought. Now I am scared of fucking it up. I have fucked up eno
ugh decisions and small jobs already. I cannot even budget correctly.

  I stand staring at the curtain rod I hold in one hand, the hacksaw in the other, as if I do not know what to do with each of them.

  The Husband appears.

  “You need that cut?” he asks matter-of-factly.

  He takes it from me, lays the rod on the edge of a step, and saws it perfectly.

  I look up at him as if he has parted the Red Sea.

  OUR SIXTH ANNIVERSARY ARRIVES, and we spend the day as far from wedded bliss as possible. I imagine him rueing the day we ever met. We have come close to a massive fight. I offer to leave the marriage, and let The Husband return to the quiet, orderly life he had before I came along and threw it all into a vortex of magazine dreams and renovation mania. But he says no, that my departure would leave him worse off financially. No mention of love, then.

  The flaws and shortcomings in our home stick out as if marked in fluorescent paint. We cannot see beyond them. We grumble like spoiled children on the verge of a tantrum when the evidence of a beautiful home stares back at us.

  This dissatisfaction wears me out. I am exhausted from keeping The Husband’s spirits up; from keeping Team Renovation cheerful, on track, and paid. This project has been more emotional than physical.

  Eventually, it sinks in that our grumbling and dissatisfaction are not about the house per se or any perceived or unperceived flaw but more about our expectations of one another and our individual and private failures. My upbringing put a premium on impulsivity, on the person with the brilliant snap decision, the decisive pronouncement. Where did that get me? Privately, I wish that we had the funds to do everything we wanted; I also wish I could do it again and do it right, and better. And within budget. I so wanted to be the saviour and the deliverer of dreams; to prove myself, so that The Husband’s faith in me might grow. Right now, we exist as stubborn residents of Limbo, unable to name—much less get rid of—this acrid smell of defeat. It is just easier to blame Francis for it all.

  23

  The Flaws

  Three months later, Francis arrives on a rainy Saturday morning to finish the remaining bits. He had asked us to hold back £500 until all the work was completed. At least I was not naive enough to do that: I held back £1,200.

  In the interim, other trades have finished their work or have popped in to undertake new work for us. Jasper was a godsend helping us hang a large mirror, and install a radiator cover, towel racks, and shower caddies. Mark, the electrician, returned to hang two ceilings fixtures and install a Datapoint computer outlet in the study, which I still do not understand, even though he must have explained it to me half a dozen times.

  In the past, I have been sad to see my builders leave. I had developed a rapport and rhythm with them, a sense of security and fraternity in their presence. Or maybe it was because I was on my own that it was nice to have a man in the house, if only for the day.

  But Francis—I am not overjoyed to see him. I just want to see the back of him. I had considered paying him what was owed and telling him not to bother finishing up, but that is no way to complete a renovation. As much as you might grow to dislike your builder, he has probably grown to dislike you, too, and so the unspoken protocol is that you both uphold your respective ends of the bargain. It is one thing for you to call your builder “unprofessional,” but he has every right to label you the same if you do not see things through to the end. Just as there are cowboy builders, there are also cowgirl clients.

  I wonder whether I expected too much of Francis. That I wanted him to do more than renovate this house: that I wanted him to make it a home. But with the clarity of time I realize that only The Husband and I can do this.

  When Francis appears that December day, he strides confidently through our home, as if this has all been his magic. He gloats about how fine it looks. I want to kick his ass. I want to tell him what a bastard he has been, screwing us financially, telling lies about us to the other trades, doing a shit job with the kitchen finishing, causing us grief. But I do not want to set him off. I just want him to get the final bits done and then get the hell out of my life.

  He runs his hand across the white Corian countertops. Self-congratulation erupts on his face like a case of measles. He had nothing to do with selecting, ordering, or installing the countertops.

  “Wow. They look great.”

  “Don’t they, though,” I say tersely. “The company I hired to fabricate and install them did a really fine job.”

  But there is no telling Francis that. As far as he is concerned, he did it all.

  I let him get on with his work because I want him gone by noon, but when I happen to walk back into the kitchen fifteen minutes later, he has his phone out and is taking pictures of the room.

  “It’s for my website. You don’t mind?”

  “Sure,” I say through clenched teeth. “But under no circumstances are you to identify us or our address.”

  “No problem.” He continues to snap away. Soon, he is going through the entire house, taking photos in every room.

  “Okay, that is quite enough.” I say it like a schoolteacher.

  When he finishes his work, he asks me for a testimonial. I give him a look that says: Are you on drugs? After scamming me on the painting quote? After trying to scam me on an invoice? After showing us a house in which you claimed to do the work? After the crap refinishing of the kitchen? Don’t think so.

  Francis’s last task in our home is to install a small shelf in the kitchen. It is only when I am dusting it a few weeks later that I discover he has installed it upside down.

  GUESTS ARRIVE FOR DINNER one drizzly Sunday. They had seen the house shortly after we bought it, and it is fair to say they thought we were crazy for buying it. Today is the big reveal. They are astonished by the transformation. The Husband beams and graciously directs all credit at me. “This was all Jane’s work.”

  A friend who is a real estate agent in Toronto and shares my renovation mania has been my long-distance sounding board. I send him before and after photos of the kitchen. He responds via email: “My heart literally stopped when I saw the photos. I cannot wait to see it in person.”

  Everyone who comes through marvels at how bright our house is, how tranquil, how perfectly designed and organized it is. When we point out a flaw, people give it a half-second’s notice and then return to praising the whole. And that is when I realize that that is how we should be looking at our home, too: not for what it is not but for what it is and has become.

  The Husband and I slowly gain confidence in living here, and the imperfections recede like scudding storm clouds. As they do, we draw a bit closer to one another, until we are gushing with pride about what we have accomplished. Yes. We.

  And still, my fingers itch as I continue to rattle around on Rightmove.

  I HAVE NOT HEARD FROM CHERYLL since I posted the Facebook message. It troubles me. Does she not want to hear from me? Maybe she does not check Facebook. Maybe she has decided too much time has elapsed; that reviving our friendship is more trouble than it is worth. I worry that I might never reconnect with her.

  I used to scorn those who never moved out of the neighbourhoods into which they were born, whose childhood and teenage friendships flowed effortlessly into adulthood, whose idea of adventure was to try out a new grocery store in another part of their city. I am grateful for my varied and somewhat free-spirited life, but such a life comes at a cost, and I fear that cost, later in life, will be disconnection and loneliness.

  I sink into a kind of mourning, angered and perplexed over why, after forty years, these childhood memories are flaring up, scratching my heart, wielding so much power over me. This grief feels as if it has resided in me a long time. It is not just about missing a person I once knew; it is grieving the loss of a once-carefree existence. My life was constructed with orderly perfection in mind, but life has instead delivered a jerky quality of starts and stops.

  I cannot entirely blame my parents f
or this: in adulthood I was always distracted by my career, by my family dramas and divorces, by bouts of trauma-related depression. Each house I moved into was to be a fresh start, and it was going to be where I got organized and settled once and for all. Except, it never works out quite that way.

  It is naive to see a new home as a fresh start, a clean slate. Clean slates are constructs of delusion; a clean slate is what we call it when we fool ourselves into thinking we have control over our lives. There is no such thing as a clean slate. Even people in a witness protection program do not believe in clean slates.

  In marriage there are no clean slates. Reports say that 12 percent of couples consider divorce when renovating a home. I would think that statistic is higher. A home renovation sharpens and deepens the cracks in a marriage like nothing else: two people viewing the same project from opposite perspectives and experiences, and projecting on to it their greatest fears, be they fears concerning money or creative expression. It is the rare couple who share a vision equally and faultlessly. We toss onto it our beliefs that once the construction dust has been swept away it will augur a new beginning. What actually happens is that a new tension arises, between one person desiring that fresh start and exploring a new setting, and the other desiring to turn back the clock to that period of stable familiarity.

  All is not lost. I came across a study from the University of Edinburgh showing that moving house is a sign that a couple have a strong relationship, the proof being that the couple value one another more than the social network they will leave behind. Turns out that social ties, and not squawking seagulls or those annoying thirty-three steps up to the garden, are what prevent people from moving. According to the study—and validating what my mother told me sixty years ago—movers (people like my mother) value their overall life satisfaction more than they do their social circle. Furthermore, the study says, “Movers seem to value their spouses or partners more highly than stayers.”

  WEEKS PASS AND THE HOUSE gradually comes together. Our shed holds fifteen boxes of uselessness marked “charity box/boot sale.” I draw up a short list of things that we need: a sofa that can fit through our front door, a few rugs, a deck out back, a new front door, window shutters, some light fixtures; the usual bits and bobs, but nothing critical.