Posted by Elizabeth

I am standing in a kitchen bathed in red, the living room peeking at me through exposed two by fours, a pile of rubble gathered at my feet.  I am wielding a hammer, my eyes masked by crystalline goggles, when I begin gleefully tearing the surprisingly delicate drywall to shreds, secretly reveling in the fact that this is not my house.

As much as I love change, as much as I love reinventing myself and my surroundings, renovating a home is my worst nightmare.  Of course the idea of the whole thing sounds utterly romantic, but I’m enough of a realist to know that I have neither the emotional strength nor fortitude to complete a project of such epic proportions.  I grow bored too quickly of projects that don’t completely capture me, and I know myself well enough to know that, if I were to start ripping my house apart, it would never be completed.  I would live the rest of my days in a hollowed out shell of a home, bemoaning my decision to ever begin in the first place.

That’s why it’s so exciting for me to be a part of the process and live vicariously through my friends Ignacio and Anna, whose half-destroyed kitchen I took a hammer to a few weekends ago.  They’ve been hemming and hawing about a major home renovation – we’re talking doubling the square footage here, people – ever since I met them.  “Go for it, just go for it,” I egged them on, the change-a-holic in me getting an emotional contact high just thinking about that sort of dramatic change.  Their project is just in the initial stages, the part of the change process that I’m always most excited about:  there’s so much possibility contained in those exposed beams, those stripped walls, those bare floors.  It’s easy to see the world afresh at the beginning.  But eventually decisions will have to be made.  Paint colors chosen.  Tiles selected.  Fixtures purchased.  This is the part of the process that would keep me up at nights.  Walls tumbling down around me is exciting; debating shades of yellow is debilitating.  I sweat the small things because I don’t care about the small things; I prefer to live my life in broad brush strokes, bringing crashing change upon myself.  But a project like this is all about the little things, and I fear – no, I know – that I would make haphazard decisions so as not to have to worry about them.  Which is why I’ll never be a candidate for home renovation.

Ignacio and Anna, on the other hand, have precisely the right temperament to complete a project like this.  They were smart enough to hire a contractor to do the major work, like laying the foundation and framing the house, while leaving the smaller jobs to complete themselves.  Knowing them, they will worry just enough about the details to make a wise choice, but not so much as to drive themselves bonkers.  They hope things will stay on schedule, but are not delusional enough to believe that it actually will (when does it ever?).  In short, they are cut out for this.

I think our approach to home improvement tells us a great deal about how we sail the seas of change.  I recently read a marvelous essay, Demolition Daddy by Daniel Duane, in The New York Times Magazine, which chronicles one writer’s chaotic – but ultimately successful – attempt to renovate his house without a master plan.  Through the process, he learned that the approach he takes as a writer – “the quick production of rough drafts” – worked surprisingly well in the world of home renovation.  “By making every decision on the fly, as we lived amid the change, we didn’t have to work very hard at visualizing each new idea.”

Couldn’t the same be said of the process of change?  We concern ourselves with creating a “master plan” before we even consider dipping our toe in the water.  We struggle when things don’t go according to the plan.  We fret when reality doesn’t meet expectation.  How much more exciting – and scary – would it be to develop our plans as we went along?  Rather than trying to project new ideas, the ideas would present themselves.  We all develop a “change language,” a unique way we think about, communicate, and negotiate the process.  Me and home improvement?  I was convinced we didn’t speak the same language.  But maybe I just speak a different dialect?  Who’s to say that there is one way to renovate a home…or a life?  Perhaps, like change itself, whatever approach works for you is the right one?  Duane says, “By breaking the job into chunks and letting each flow into the next, we entered a kind of fugue state of intuitive forward progress, designing absolutely everything in terms of what felt best for the two of us and nothing more.”  Imagine how much easier home improvement – and change, and life itself – would be if we took those words to heart.