If Your Wife Says “Renovation,” Run

How a twentieth-anniversary kitchen became three bathrooms, a roof, windows, structural repairs, mould remediation—and two Westies who decided the old rules had been abandoned.

Dear husbands: if your wife begins talking about renovating the house, my advice is to run away. Hide.

Lock yourself in the bathroom, turn on the fan and announce that you have developed the world’s worst case of projectile diarrhea. Mentioning diarrhea is rarely a conversation starter. It has probably ended more domestic disputes than counselling ever could.

Do whatever is necessary to escape.

I do not think you need to go immediately to DEFCON 2 and begin talking about divorce. That would be an overreaction. But keep it in your toolkit. You may end up there anyway if you proceed with the full renovation.

And when someone gives you a proposed budget and timetable, take both numbers and multiply them by four. Do not engage in any of this pissant doubling. Doubling is for optimists and fools.

Multiply by four.

Our renovation began as a twentieth-anniversary gift for my wife.

A new kitchen. That was all.

Well, a new kitchen—and perhaps the upstairs bathroom. A manageable project. A loving gesture. Two months, I was told.

This was seven months ago.

The first mistake was that, rather than beginning the renovation properly, I hired someone - a friend of a friend - from Facebook who claimed to be a project manager and designer.

It turned out that he appeared to be a man who had taught himself Computer-Aided Design (CAD) the previous weekend, owned some sort of restaurant-supply company and possessed no discernible ability to design or manage a residential renovation.

I became suspicious when he began asking me for more money almost every three days. But he had me.

It was the perfect combination of people-pleasing, apathy and my general distaste for discussing renovations. I would rather pay someone another thousand dollars than engage in a forty-five-minute conversation about cupboard depth.

So I let it continue.

Eventually, however, I discovered that his kitchen plan was an abomination.

Under his design, unloading the dishwasher would make the oven inaccessible. Opening one appliance would render another appliance unusable. The entire room had been designed as though the laws of physics were merely suggestions that could be addressed later by the trades.

He also spoke about tearing down walls with the breezy confidence of a man describing the removal of a Post-it note.