A Short History of Stuff: DIY Edition

Despite being New Zealand-born and having lived in this house for nearly eight years, I have done little in the way of renovation and redecoration.  There has been some moving of beds, some purchasing of couches, and some routine maintenance, but not a lot else.  I tend to caution, renovations-wise, I think, since in the back of my mind there’s always a worry that I’ll run out of money, time or taste.  I haven’t minded living in a house that’s in effect a period-piece, since most fixtures have stayed in reasonable order, save some harrying by the dogs.

Indeed, when I first viewed this house at its open home, it was precisely its unfashionable colours and structures to which I was attracted: exterior partially clad in Hardiplank, interior joinery the same colour as the dark aluminium window frames.  There was a uniformity to its construction and presentation that pleased me; no-one had taken much of a renovator’s go at it, save for new wallpaper and carpets, some new fixtures in the bathroom and a bright green benchtop in the small kitchen.  I treated it as a gallery space for my posters, paintings and piano, and cheerfully offset the tones by-and-large tasteful and neutral with the primary colours of my Stuff.

However, Thing Fall Apart.  Incremental increases in the volume of dogs over a five-year period have not been kind to carpets or porch posts, and the advent of the señor saw the conversion of the small spare room — previously a genteel sort of space with a single bed, a collection of children’s books and the late-afternoon sun — into a fully-fledged Man Cave, featuring all the accoutrements of a gamer-epicure.  Science fiction and fantasy volumes competed with Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson for space on a roughly-constructed bookshelf, and pieces of computer hardware piled up under a print of Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, the latter (mine) perhaps the single remnant of the room’s former state.  This notwithstanding, it was the señor, and not your humble diarist, who first suggested that the Man Cave could readily be converted into a nursery for the impending harvestbaby.

This conversation we had during our first pregnancy, in the shadow of whose early end we returned to our prior wine-drinking, paperback-stockpiling, mess-making habits.  It arose again, in a mini-version of the eternal return, not long after our eleven-week scan late last year, with the unexpected result that, come new year, we had committed to some repainting and refurbishing.  From here, small project has beget small project with the length and irreversibility of an Old Testament genealogy.

Before we could convert to a nursery the Cave, we needed to do something about all the books.  An obvious choice was to hang shelves in the larger spare room, which had spent several months as a rather sad repository for the excess of Stuff not contained elsewhere in the house.  Before the shelves could be built and hung, it seemed politic to paint the larger spare room.  This was the first task we completed.

After the large spare room was painted, the señor concluded that it would also be advisable to paint the dark joinery, whose historical relicry now seemed out of place with the off-white, cod-patriotic colour we’d chosen for the walls (Lyttelton Quarter, for those of you playing with the Dulux colour chart at home.)  When eventually I was persuaded by this argument, it quickly became clear there was no turning back.  The purchase of a tin of Raurimu-tint felt unexpectedly monumental.  Another feature of the appeal of the dark joinery had once been its exact match to my grandmother’s Spreydon flat, but nearly five years after her death, it seemed no longer timely to cling to such a resemblance.

What if, I said to the señor, we moved into the living room for the puppies’ delivery and early days?  Then we could paint the master bedroom and hall without interference at night from lingering fumes, all while the other dogs were away from home.  By this reasoning were most of our hallway and cupboard doors removed and our erstwhile sleeping space converted into the soothing blend of grey and off-white it now sports.  ”It looks so — modern!” was my explanation upon seeing it completed, a moment in which my attempt to detach from the aesthetics of interior decoration was temporarily overwhelmed by my inner nine-year-old.

Following this there has been the matter of the bed that broke when we dismantled it.  Our growing feeling that we might have ditched the wrong bed when the señor moved in seemed to be confirmed by plastic slat-holding brackets that had achieved the consistency of wax and snapped when the slats were removed.  Having a material reason for the previously occasional falling-out of a slat while we were sleeping was something of a relief to me, since it superseded my “too fat for this bed!” theorem.  It led to a more immediate problem, however; one that the señor eventually resolved with the purchase of a mains-powered drill (more powerful than its dinkier battery-powered alternative) and two boxes of button-head screws.  For the first time in memory we slept through the night, unencumbered by the responsibility of multiple dogs (who will shortly return) or the sporadic interruption of slats gone rogue.

There is still a hallway that needs its topcoat, numerous cupboards without doors, the dark joinery as yet unpainted in the larger spare room (into which the puppies have moved, for now) and the proto-nursery currently a dark impassable space filled with boxes and furniture.  The residual fear, as the señor has it, is that when everything is finally unloaded from that room — facilitating at last the conversion whose planning has been the root of all this other painting and decorating — it will be revealed to be a repository for far more furniture than can reasonably be housed anywhere else.  We may yet have to do the thing that few people in my family have successfully done: throw some Stuff out.  Meanwhile, however, we are living in a space that is changing in the way our lives are now changing: new form, new colour, new cladding.  It is not at all surprising that the anticipation of a birth should lead to a domestic transformation.  What is surprising for me, however, is how much of an adventure this renovatory process has been and how well I am tolerating living in this halfway house of DIY.