While We're At It . . .

Seven months, three bathrooms, black mould, rotting joists, a new roof and one highly aggressive toilet later, I have some advice for married men.

Note: This essay shares personal anecdotes and comments on my lived experience and perhaps qualifies as research at Cambridge.

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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.

Finally, a realtor friend saved me by steering me toward a woman with an architectural background who actually understood design and construction.

By that point, I had already spent almost $10,000 on project management and plans that would ultimately be placed in the garbage.

At the time, losing $10,000 at the starting gate seemed catastrophic. I had no idea that it would soon become one of the more trivial expenses.

Once we began planning the kitchen properly, another problem became obvious.

If we were installing a modern kitchen, we could not leave the adjoining living room looking as though it had escaped from 1987.

So the living room had to be renovated too. Then someone looked casually toward the staircase.

“What about the stairs?”

Yes, of course. The stairs. Why leave any part of the house unmolested?

And so the kitchen renovation expanded to include the upstairs bathroom, the living room and the stairs. But it was still, in my mind, a three-month project.

After about three weeks, the kitchen had been demolished, and we were becoming acquainted on a first-name basis with the DoorDash drivers.

Yes, I know. Unhealthy processed food. At least it didn’t contain black mould. Foreshadowing.

We could have used the barbecue more frequently. We could have prepared meals with a hot plate and microwave. We could have behaved like disciplined, resourceful adults.

But DoorDash was easier.

My eighty-year-old mother-in-law, who normally cooks, wanted no part of improvising in the basement. I offered to move the oven downstairs and have it connected.

“Nyet, nyet.”

She is Russian. She is eighty years old. And she does not take to new ideas.

Instead, she would call me and ask me to order a pizza.

Then, while I was standing in the ruins of my kitchen—which now resembled photographs of London after the bombing—the contractor pointed toward the ceiling.

There was a drip.

A drip coming out of a ceiling is never good. No contractor has ever pointed at one and said, “That will save you money.”

They put a camera into the ceiling and discovered that the floor joists were beginning to rot.

The source was the master-bathroom shower drain, which had either exploded, committed hara-kiri or simply abandoned its responsibility to keep water inside the plumbing system.

Water had been leaking between the floors.

The camera was persuasive. The joist was genuinely rotting. It was black, ugly and surrounded by mould.

I recommended Lysol.

A few cans of disinfectant seemed, to me, like a proportionate and admirably economical response to the problem.

Spray the black areas. Open a window. Perhaps light a scented candle. Crisis resolved.

The renovator talked me out of it.

There was some explanation involving spores, containment, respiratory danger and the fact that spraying household cleaner onto mould buried between two floors does not constitute professional remediation.

Apparently, black mould is a health hazard.

So, regrettably, was my proposed solution.

And, naturally, the water was coming from the master bathroom—the only room in the house that had already been renovated.

At this point, our home renovation ceased to be a design project and became an archaeological expedition into the incompetence of previous builders and tradespeople. Today, it seems like if you know which end of a hammer to hold, you are now qualified as a renovator.

Every wall we opened revealed another crime scene.

The man who renovated the bathroom five years earlier had come highly recommended. Apparently, however, he had decided not to install a vapour barrier behind the shower wall.

This would have required perhaps two dollars’ worth of plastic sheets and twenty staples.

By saving himself that expense and effort, he may ultimately have cost me close to $100,000.

This is the economics of home renovation.

Save two dollars today. Destroy the floor of the house tomorrow.

Once mould is growing between the second floor and the main floor, you cannot simply spray it with Lysol and hope for the best.

I had already suggested that.

The professionals were strangely resistant. Drywall must come down. Tile must come up. And once the tile comes up, the shower must come out.

The cost difference between restoring a bathroom after chasing mould through it and simply building an entirely new bathroom was not especially significant.

So, presto, our kitchen renovation now included a complete master-bathroom renovation.

Then we discovered that the mould had travelled into the bedroom. And the attic.

It had apparently purchased an all-access pass to the house.

Nearby, we found a joist into which the previous renovator had drilled a hole for a water pipe. The pipe was approximately four inches in diameter. The hole diameter was approximately eight inches. Even I could see that this was a problem.

I am a man with no construction skills, limited spatial perception and occasional difficulty replacing a roll of toilet paper. Yet even I understood that cutting away most of a structural joist and leaving the hole near its edge was not an ideal engineering practice.

It looked as though a sufficiently heavy cat could have brought down the floor.

The renovator who had done the work was no longer answering his telephone.

I left a message threatening small-claims court, which he probably deleted before I had completed the first sentence.

I knew I would never pursue him. Chasing a tradesman through a small-claims court is itself a renovation project. It consumes time, energy and money, and at the end you may receive a judgment against a man who has no assets, no fixed address and seventeen corporations with nearly identical names.

So I swallowed the expense.

We paid approximately $1,300 for an engineer to inspect the joist and tell me what I already knew: the joist needed to be reinforced. For such a judgement, the only qualification was vision.

Then we paid thousands more for men in masks to arrive and paint mysterious substances over the mould.

For a while, they suggested that we might have to leave the house and stay in an Airbnb.

I decided I would rather inhale a limited amount of black mould. I would put it on a cracker and eat it to save a few grand.

The Airbnb was a bridge too far.

Then came the attic.

The man who had charged me thousands of dollars to insulate it had apparently cheated me. What he had installed, he had installed badly.

The new contractors explained the technical errors.

There was talk of airflow, baffles, moisture, thermal bridging and several other phrases that immediately caused my mind to leave my body.

Perhaps it is ADHD. Perhaps it is fatigue.

Perhaps there is simply a limit to how much information about attic insulation a human being can absorb before surrendering.

I reduced the conversation to its only important question:

“What is this going to cost?”

The easiest way to reach the attic properly, I was told, was through the roof.

Reaching the attic through the roof meant removing shingles.

The shingles, I then discovered, had only a few years of life remaining.

The previous owner had installed shingles that he may have purchased on TEMU. They were of such astonishing cheapness that he had dispensed with the tedious formality of putting proper underlayment beneath them. They were already curling, as though embarrassed by their own existence.

This was, incidentally, the same previous house owner who proudly advertised a “built-in surround sound system.” It turned out that the speakers were decorative and the electronics entirely fictional. The system performed flawlessly, provided your ambition was to recreate the silence of a Trappist monastery.

We went on. Every new tradesman delights in explaining that every tradesman who came before him was either a fool or a criminal.

There is apparently no adequately completed construction work anywhere in Canada. Every house is merely a temporary structure being held together until the next expert arrives and condemns it.

Since the shingles would need replacing soon anyway, we decided to replace the roof.

Then someone noticed the gutters were leaking water against the brick. The gutters would need to be replaced too. Then they began discussing fascia.

I do not know what fascia is.

I know only that I apparently needed new fascia and that fascia costs money.

Then someone asked whether I had noticed that the windows had never been replaced. They also had white trim, which is apparently a major design faux pas.

I had once thought the previous owner was merely cheap because he had never replaced the appliances.

It turned out that he had never replaced anything.

Every major component of the house was reaching the end of its natural life at exactly the same time. So we added windows.

Meanwhile, my wife and mother-in-law, both raised in the Soviet Union, became convinced that the entire renovation was one gigantic confidence scheme.

I reviewed the invoices carefully and became reasonably certain that it was not a con.

It was merely the combined effect of old materials, previous incompetent work, expanding mould and the irreversible domino logic of renovation.

My mother-in-law would curse at the contractor in Russian and tell him that the house had become a disaster.

She was not entirely wrong.

But I also remembered her old apartment in Russia, where a patch of black mould in the shower appeared to have been granted permanent residency.

In those old Stalin-era, post-war apartment buildings, routine maintenance did not seem to occupy a central position in domestic life. You repaired something after it exploded, collapsed or burst into flames.

Preventive maintenance was regarded as bourgeois anxiety.

My wife and mother-in-law therefore viewed the removal of walls, ceilings and mould as further evidence that Canadian contractors were manufacturing problems for profit.

There is something uniquely exhausting about living inside a construction zone.

I retreated to the basement with the dogs, shut the door and ran an air cleaner continuously.

Despite this, everything acquired a thin layer of dust.

The basement filled with enormous blue plastic containers holding the contents of our kitchen, along with boxes of papers from the labour litigation that has provided another ongoing nightmare in my life.

The result was less a man cave than a bunker assembled by a mentally unravelling archivist.

I mostly hid there.

My daughter would enter, look around in exasperation, clean the basement and ask how I could live without mopping the floors every day.

I thought I was doing fairly well simply keeping myself and the dogs alive.

Then came the fruit flies.

My mother-in-law insists on keeping fruit on the counter. Apparently, fruit flies are admirably literal creatures and do, in fact, congregate around fruit.

The odd thing is that, judging by the DoorDash charges flying onto my credit card, we are not ordering a great deal of fruit.

Nevertheless, the buggers have established a thriving colony somewhere in the renovation zone. Perhaps it is an abandoned pizza box. Perhaps it is one of my houseplants, which is still being watered but is slowly dying from lack of sunlight upstairs. Perhaps the fruit flies have simply recognized that normal household authority has collapsed and moved in.

I cannot be bothered to locate the source.

At this stage of the renovation, I am not conducting forensic investigations into insect breeding grounds. I simply know that unless an electronic fly killer is operating or I begin spraying, the fruit-fly population expands with the confidence of a species facing no natural predators.

Spraying creates its own problem.

The dogs regard a can of insect spray as an exciting interactive toy. The moment I begin spraying at the flies, they chase me around the basement, snapping at the air as though I am dispensing treats.

Apparently, they believe they require a refreshing blast of fly-killing Raid directly into the mouth, perhaps as a form of breath spray. Maybe inhaling Raid will give me cancer, and I will die a painful death, but I am living for the now.

My daughter, being somewhat more ecologically sensitive, prefers the electronic fly zapper. The fruit flies drift stupidly toward it and are electrocuted with a crack so loud and theatrical that the machine makes the death of a single insect sound like the destruction of a small electrical substation.

Unfortunately, Toby, our boy Westie, is terrified of the noise.

If the zapper is operating, he refuses to come downstairs. Since he also sleeps in the basement, this has created an ongoing nightly negotiation in which I must choose between eliminating the fruit flies and persuading my dog to enter his own bedroom.

So every evening, I unplug the machine, allow Toby to descend and wait until he settles. Then I look up at the surviving fruit flies circling triumphantly overhead.

My last-ditch attempt was a dish of apple cider vinegar and soap. It killed a few. When my daughter left a goblet of white wine after hosting a small party in our construction zone, it killed even more.

I told her the leftover wine was now high in protein.

At least the flies died happy—drunk and full of hope. Especially Tony, one of the gang living in the stem of a forgotten banana, who perhaps died convinced that all the girl flies were totally into him.

Then I was forced to begin sleeping in the basement.

The master bedroom had first been declared unsafe because of the black mould. Later, it became effectively impassable because it was filled with construction materials, tools and various objects capable of causing serious injury during a two-in-the-morning bathroom run.

At my age, with an enlarged prostate, the route between bed and toilet must be clear, direct and free of exposed lumber.

So I moved downstairs.

The dogs immediately concluded that this was excellent news.

The basement couch had always been their couch. My decision to sleep on it did not alter their understanding of the property rights involved. I was merely another object that had been placed on their furniture.

The couch also seemed to be approximately two inches shorter than I was, so I slept with my feet hanging over one end while Toby and Malibu arranged themselves tightly along either side of me.

This was apparently not enough.

They soon began competing for the premium couch position—the spot closest to my body, preferably pressed directly against my ribs or occupying the area where my legs were supposed to go.

These territorial disputes occasionally involved growling, snapping and sudden attempts to dislodge the other dog.

I must admit that I did not respond with a particularly Christian commitment to reconciliation. There was no careful effort to identify the root causes of the conflict, encourage mutual understanding or create an equitable couch-sharing framework.

I simply identified whichever dog appeared to be the instigator and ordered that dog off the couch. Then I fell asleep.

Sometime later, I would wake up and discover that the expelled offender had quietly returned and was once again sleeping beside me, usually in the exact position over which the original conflict had begun.

Apparently, my disciplinary rulings had no lasting authority.

In renovation times, even exile is temporary.

The dogs had always been trained to scratch at the sliding door upstairs when they needed to go into the backyard.

At least, that was the theory.

I had even paid to send them to training school.

Well, I paid to send one of them all the way through training school. The other was essentially expelled about halfway through. Even so, he had been toilet trained.

Or so I believed.

Once the renovation began, however, they appear to have reconsidered the entire concept.

We had taped sheets of cardboard to parts of the basement floor to protect it from construction dust and damage. Toby apparently examined this arrangement and concluded that the cardboard had been installed for his personal convenience.

Why fight through a barricade, search for a human being, wait for a door to open and maintain some basic toilet discipline when there was perfectly good cardboard lying ten feet away?

Renovation had introduced a new moral order.

In ordinary times, one goes outside. In renovation times, everywhere is a toilet.

Unless I timed the dogs’ release from their morning sleep exquisitely—synchronizing doors, leashes, barriers and the workings of their bowels and blatter with the precision of a military operation—I would occasionally open the door for the renovator and discover that one of the dogs had left him a gift.

The renovator is a good man. A nice man. He also spoke Russian and could explain what was actually happening to my mother-in-law far more effectively than I ever could.

He would come into the basement, stop and point with embarrassed politeness toward a pile of dog feces on the cardboard. There is no dignified response to this.

You cannot blame the dog convincingly. It is plainly the dog’s fault, but it is your house, your cardboard and your animal.

So I would apologize, collect the offending material and act as though this were simply another routine part of project management.

Electrical inspection.

Drywall delivery.

Dog feces removal.

We moved on.

The dogs were confined to the basement because I feared that one of them would enthusiastically greet a tradesman and be crushed by a falling piece of quartzite.

Their alternative response to tradespeople was to enter a barking paroxysm.

Two eighteen-pound West Highland terriers are unlikely to intimidate a six-foot-four plumber, but this has never reduced their confidence.

Then we discovered that the upstairs toilet was leaking.

Of course it was.

At some point, perhaps six months into what had been presented as a two-month project, I stopped caring about design.

Early in the process, our designer and project manager dragged us through kitchen stores, plumbing stores, lighting stores and vast showrooms filled with marble, quartzite, countertops and taps that apparently had personalities.

Everything had a name.

Every tap, handle, slab and light fixture came with a story, a design philosophy and a price that would have purchased a used automobile.

At first, I tried to participate.

Did I want warm gold or brushed gold?

Did I prefer this bevel?

What did I think of that sconce?

I still do not know precisely what a sconce is. I believe it is a light that costs more when attached to a wall.

Eventually, my answer to every question became:

“What do you think?”

Our designer is a lovely woman, but she must have recognized that I had lost the will to make independent decisions.

I did not want to choose between two subtle shades of white. I wanted walls. I wanted doors. I wanted a kitchen in which the oven and dishwasher could be used during the same calendar month.

My wife eventually stopped making decisions and began saying that she had not been consulted, although every significant design choice had ultimately been hers.

But never mind. We continued.

The fireplace remains unfinished.

There is apparently a slab of stone, marble, quartzite or compressed material quarried from a sacred mountain in Peru that would look excellent around it.

All I know is that it costs a bloody fortune.

That portion of the project will wait until I have saved more money and emotionally recovered.

Then my daughter announced another problem.

Her bedroom shares a wall with the bathroom used by her eighty-year-old grandmother. The new high-tech toilet sits directly against that wall, and there is apparently little or no sound insulation.

Consequently, every bowel movement and urination echoes with impressive clarity through the wall and into my daughter’s bedroom.

This is not how any person wishes to begin the morning. I tried to discuss the matter delicately.

There is, however, no truly elegant way to say, “We need to renovate this wall because some person’s bathroom activities are acoustically magnificent.”

So we removed the door, opened the wall and added sound insulation.

Another small job. Another bill.

Another part of the house entered the renovation. By this point, we were no longer renovating one bathroom. We were renovating three.

There was the master bathroom, the guest bathroom and the powder room.

The powder room is the tiny bathroom on the main floor. I had never heard the term before this renovation. I do not know what it means to “take a powder,” and I have never personally applied powder in a bathroom—or anywhere else—but apparently that is what the room is called.

The bathroom upstairs that I almost never use is called the guest bathroom.

I did not know that either.

Renovation has an entire language that I apparently avoided learning for the first sixty years of my life. There are powder rooms, guest bathrooms, sconces, fascia, quartzite, bevels and dozens of other words that seem designed to prevent ordinary people from understanding how much money they are about to spend.

Then came the toilets.

This part was entirely my fault.

We went to a toilet showroom, and somehow I became fascinated by these extraordinarily respectful toilets that open their lids as soon as you enter the room. I do not know why this impressed me.

Perhaps, after six months of being ignored by contractors, designers, appliances and structural joists, I was simply moved by an object that acknowledged my presence.

Then someone mentioned that my mother-in-law might appreciate a bidet.

I had never used one.

The idea of directing a stream of water toward what I will delicately call the anal porthole had never especially attracted me. It had never appeared on my list of unmet personal needs.

But on that particular afternoon, I became strangely materialistic about toilets.

It was not a matter of keeping up with the Joneses. Nobody on our street discusses toilets. No neighbour has ever invited me inside and said, “You really must see what our toilet does.”

Nevertheless, we bought a toilet with a remote control.

A remote control. Why does a toilet require a remote control?

It already flushes automatically. The lid raises itself. The seat warms. It has settings, preferences and, as far as I know, perhaps its own Wi-Fi password.

I am sure it has an app. Everything must have an app.

Soon toilets will require software updates.

I did eventually try the bidet function. This was a mistake.

I pressed one of the buttons, experienced the promised stream of water and then stood up before the machine had finished its cycle.

The toilet continued spraying into the room.

There I was, desperately attempting to cover the stream with my butt before it soaked the new and extravagantly overpriced wallpaper beside the toilet.

It was an undignified contest between a half-naked man and an intelligent plumbing fixture.

The toilet was winning.

I began pressing buttons on the remote, but every symbol looked as though it might activate a different form of aquatic assault. I had no idea which button stopped the water and which one might increase the pressure.

For several frantic seconds, I attempted to use my own body as a human splash guard.

Eventually, the spraying stopped. I have not pressed the bidet button since.

In fact, I have developed a new appreciation for the perfectly ordinary toilet in the basement.

It has no remote control. It does not recognize me when I enter. It does not lift its lid as a gesture of respect. It does not heat, spray, dry, illuminate or attempt to establish a wireless connection.

You press the handle. The contents disappear.

After this renovation, that strikes me as the height of luxury.

Through all of this, I have found myself thinking about my father.

He died almost four years ago, though sometimes it feels much more recent.

He paid about $23,000 for the house in Winnipeg where I grew up. I believe he bought it in the late 1950s.

When my mother was alive, there had been talk of renovating it and building an extension. But she developed cancer when I was about fifteen and died not long afterward.

The renovation never happened. My father never remarried. He stayed in the same house.

He saw no reason to renovate it.

It was structurally sound. The roof kept the weather out. The rooms remained where they had always been.

That was sufficient.

He bought his shoes at Walmart. He had no taste for luxury, display, fashion or pretension. He did not care whether a kitchen looked modern or whether a light fixture made a statement.

My friends used to visit and say that entering his house was like travelling back to the 1970s.

They did not say it with contempt. It was affectionate amusement.

Nothing changed.

The furniture remained. The walls remained. The kitchen remained. The entire house seemed immune to the passage of time.

And it suited my father perfectly.

I am beginning to think he possessed more wisdom than I gave him credit for.

Of course, I am not sure what he would have done with rotting joists and black mould. Even my father might eventually have conceded that a shower should not be dissolving the structure of the house.

Although, knowing him, he might first have tried Lysol. But he understood something I did not.

After the renovation is completed, the newness lasts perhaps two weeks.

You walk into the kitchen and say, “Oh, look at this. Isn’t this beautiful?”

You admire the new counters, the lighting, the fireplace and the furniture. Then, very quickly, it becomes the kitchen. The new car becomes the car. The beautiful room becomes the room in which you leave your socks.

You can occupy only one room at a time. You can sit in only one chair. The extraordinary becomes ordinary with remarkable speed.

We are not even finished, and I think I have already reached that stage.

The house is brighter. It is undoubtedly more attractive. The kitchen functions. The mould has been removed. The floors are less likely to collapse beneath a heavy cat.

But it is once again simply the place where I live.

We are now six months into the project and pushing toward seven. There is still more to do.

One day, theoretically, it will end. The contractors will leave. The dust will settle. The blue containers will disappear.

The dogs will be released from the basement.

The DoorDash driver will wonder whether we have died.

And perhaps, after the final invoice has been paid, I will stand in the completed kitchen and feel some mixture of pride, relief and financial trauma.

So, gentlemen, heed my warning.

When your wife says, “I’ve been thinking about renovating,” do not attempt to reason with her. Do not explain the danger of opening walls. Do not warn her about builders’ mistakes, leaking drains, black mould or structural joists. None of that will frighten her away.

Head directly for the bathroom. Lock the door. Turn on the fan. Flush the toilet repeatedly and make whatever noises are necessary.

Perhaps she will become distracted. Perhaps the idea will pass. Because that is how it begins.

“Oh, just one small renovation,” they said.

“Just the bathroom and the kitchen.”