renovating

by haywardhelen

We don’t just travel to see new places. We also go away in order to come back and see our home in a new light. We go to have a break from the same-old, same old that otherwise dictates our days. We travel to leave behind the tables and chairs that we brush past so often we don’t see them truly, if we look at them at all. We go away to experience, for a split second, what our home looks like when we reopen the front door and wonder, ‘Do I really live here?’

A scene in The Wind in the Willows captures this. Fed up with being at home, alone in his burrow, Mole packs up, closes the hatch and takes to the road with his friends Toad and Rattie. Many happy months pass, full of joys and mishaps. But once summer turns to autumn and then a bitter winter, Mole starts missing home and determines to find his burrow, despite a raging storm and menacing taunts from the weasels and ferrets of the wild wood, on the edge of which Mole lives. Just as Mole is abandoning his search, his whiskers twitch at the scent of home. Together, Rattie and Mole dig through snow to lift the entrance hatch. However, once they descend the ladder and shine a lantern into the gloom, Mole loses heart. The burrow is dark, dank and derelict – not at all the warm cosy home Mole has been longing for. Noticing his friend’s tears, Rattie springs into action, sending off a team of baby mice to fetch provisions. Meanwhile, the two friends bustle about cleaning up debris and reversing the gloom. In no time, a fire is burning in the grate with chestnuts roasting on the coals. When the mice return they all share a modest feast. Then Mole sinks into his chair by the fire – home at last.

This story speaks to something deep in me. I’m always struck by Mole’s fierce determination to find his burrow, followed by his embarrassment at discovering its neglect. I like that Rattie rallies to support his friend, and that the mice are excited by Mole’s return. It may surprise you for me to say, but in my mind this story captures the essence of renovating.

When, during an on-line design course, I was asked to create a mood board for homework, I left it till the last minute. Why would I want to buy expensive design magazines only to flip through them backwards? However, conscientious student that I am, on the final weekend I bought two European design magazines and flipped through them at the kitchen table, stopping at pages that spoke to me. After a while, I stopped reading the text and just looked at the pictures. Then I started snipping pages from the magazines and put them, collage like, on the table. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and figured that it might be better not to. The critical part of my mind quietened as I played with the images on the table. I wasn’t scaring my unconscious with how much time, money and skill I’d need to carry out my ideas, I was just playing.

It can be hard to admit that you don’t know what you like. Our ego doesn’t like uncertainty, the blurring of edges. However, I’ve come around to thinking that not knowing what you like might be a necessary preliminary to finding out what appeals as you and your life changes over time. There is something honest about laying yourself open to shifts in your own taste.

Renovating, I like to think, isn’t about shelling out big dollars at a hardware store the size of a plane-hanger. It isn’t about bettering your Instagram feed. Nor is it about creating your dream home. Renovating is about reaching deep inside yourself to bring to life spaces that speak to you, that sing to you, in the present. Renovating is about entering a nether land in which the gap between fantasy and reality shrinks – if only momentarily, if only in your minyd’s eye.

When I was interviewing people for my project about domestic life, my ears pricked up when several women mentioned that their mothers ‘never really owned the place they lived in’. These mothers, so their daughters thought, were convinced that the living room had to look a certain way, following an unspoken convention. The inner longings of these mothers – their wildest dreams – didn’t get a look in when it came to decorating the rooms they spent most time in. One woman I spoke to, the daughter of one of these mothers, shared with me her own kitchen renovation fantasy. In this fantasy, Amy had a day-bed in the kitchen so that she’ was always on hand to take a cake from the oven. ‘I would so love to be that girl in the lovely home’, she said, ‘surrounded by old friends and vegetable swaps’. And yet in her next breath she confessed that, in real life, she’d moved house eighteen times in twenty years, and that while she spent a large proportion of her income on good food, she hadn’t the patience to grow her own vegetables.

It was clear that Amy felt something important was missing from the home she grew up in. Soul, perhaps. A liveliness that, when it came time to set up her own home, she sought to create for herself. She would create a home in which she could flourish, be her whole self, uncramped by inhibition or convention.

Most of us grew up listening to stories in which a Ulysses-like hero ventures forth to foreign lands in search of adventure, only returning home once he has developed a sufficiently complex character to want to settle down. However, there is another version of this story which gets told less often. In this reverse hero story, the hero doesn’t have to engage in years of travel in order to find herself. In this story, the hero keeps herself and her home buoyant, the opposite of staid and dull. She is forever engaged in updating where she lives. She keeps moving things about so that she can better see her home – so that it can surprise her. She goes away and comes back in order to play with her home in her mind, creating new links between ideas and objects, leading to new arrangements that refresh her eye.

For most of us, it isn’t enough just to be comfortable at home, to live without hardship there. If we’re to find contentment at home, we have to actively seek it. Like Rattie and Mole met by dirt and cobwebs, we have to be willing to do the work of translating our fantasies into reality. We have to accept the constraints that go with renovating – the tight timelines and finite budgets and the liaising with trades people.

Holding space for oneself is incredibly hard to describe. Still, we know it when we feel it, when we achieve it for ourselves. We know it when our home holds us in a way that inspires and contains us, when it asks neither too much nor too little from us.

Some say, with disdain in their voice, that renovating is a first-world problem. Perhaps it is. Then again, I’m yet to discover a culture that doesn’t decorate their homes and bodies.

When we renovate, we change our surroundings in line with our changing self. Like Rattie and Mole, we make good. We sweep the floor, light the fire, get provisions in and invite friends over. In ways like these we demonstrate that our home, and our life in it, isn’t fixed, but is as changeable as we are.

Why is this so hard? Why does renovating lead us to roll our eyes, to swear freely and to mutter under our breath, ‘never again’? A big reason why renovating is hard is because it isn’t natural. Our instinct is to take the easy path, the comfortable and less effortful path. It isn’t to make that special effort, to go that extra mile, to paint that final coat. Renovating is also hard because we secretly hate it. We hate our painting clothes rolled up at the back of the cupboard. We hate that there aren’t fairies that come in the night to do our work for us. We hate the mess and the smells, the money and the time that DIY consumes.

Ultimately renovating is hard because it punctures our fantasy of what our home could look like. It means accepting the good enough in the here and now, rather than an ideal in the far-off future. At the end of the day, it means settling for less than the best.

Just as well that there is a flip side, a positive side to renovating. Which is that because it isn’t a fantasy, it offers real satisfaction.

I perhaps should add that Mole doesn’t stay by his fireside toasting his toes forever. Soon enough, Rattie gets restless and persuades his friend to join him on further adventures. And so the tension between home and away, between keeping warm by the fire and freedom on the open road, continues.