Remodeling

So I was standing there, measuring and cutting baseboards using the electric saw I borrowed from my dad.

It’s a good saw – Dewalt 10” Single Bevel Compound Miter Swivel Saw. You can set it at different angles so you can cut pieces of baseboard with diagonal edges and join them on corner walls. I didn’t know this piece of technology existed until two months ago.

Anyway, I was cutting the baseboards — plank after plank. And I thought, just for one second, what if I just laid my head down on this table and slowly brought down the saw into my eye sockets…

That is what remodeling a house has been like for me.

That moment, repeated over and over.

Sometimes I’m trying to cover a hole in a wall with a premixed joint compound, and I think about taking the dull putty knife and jamming it repeatedly and aggressively into my throat. Sometimes I’m trying to put up a light fixture, and I get the urge to grab onto the live wire and tell someone to turn on a switch to “test it.” Sometimes I’m sanding drywall and wonder what it would feel like to swallow a bundle of sandpaper. Rule of threes, I think you get the point.

That is not to say I have not enjoyed the “journey” – a word we are all contractually obligated to use about these experiences – it just means that even the most rewarding journeys are riddled with anti-abortion signs and weird men in rest-stop bathrooms. I think that sentence only makes sense to me.

The truth is, despite all those isolated moments of suicidal rage, remodeling a new house with my wife has been strangely enjoyable. I know that probably sounds like I had rather negative expectations of this process, but that’s only because I did. It’s just the way I am about some shit; I should probably talk to someone about that.

It’s kind of cool to see an actual physical component of my home that is not a picture frame and know that my hands did that. In those precious moments, I feel like I get the value of hard work. But in most moments, I just can’t wait for this shit to be over.