Illustration by Victoria Borges
Before my husband, Kevin, and I undertook the renovation of our home, I would have scoffed at the idea that a house could come between us.
Demolition got underway in the heat of August, and we watched in awe as an addition went up and the house’s new rooms were framed out. “Is it stressful?” friends would ask, and we’d shrug our shoulders amusedly, as if the question didn’t bear considering.
The electrical went in, and then the plumbing. “When the drywall goes in, you’re 90 percent there,” said our project manager as we quietly celebrated the house’s quick progress and our own marital fortitude.
But then we got the word that the custom-painted wood cabinets I’d picked out were going to take five weeks to be delivered. Kevin pushed hard for a factory-white Thermofoil finish, which would take less than two weeks to come in. “We’ll never be able to repaint them,” I argued.
Renovating a house is a unique challenge for couples because it requires them to make hundreds of decisions, large and small, in a short timeframe. Every selection has the potential to affect how long the project will take and how much it will cost.
One Saturday, I crisscrossed the city visiting tile shops. I returned home in the late afternoon, the back seat of my car laden with samples, and couldn’t understand when Kevin immediately lost his cool. “You couldn’t have found some tile you liked at the first store?” he asked. He didn’t care about the tile. He cared that I’d wasted a day we could have spent together.
There’s research that explains why every decision was so hard for Kevin and me to make. Retailers call it a “shopping gender gap.” Overwhelmingly, men make their buying decisions based on their immediate needs while women are willing to delay instant gratification to ensure a product will work for them over the long term. Kevin wanted cabinets; I wanted cabinets we’d never have to replace. Kevin wanted tile; I wanted tile we’d never grow tired of.
As the days grew darker and the project dragged on, our fights grew more frequent.
“Can you get off your phone and tune in?” Kevin would ask, glancing over my shoulder at the Pinterest account where the pins numbered in the thousands. “I’m not tuned out,” I’d say defensively. “I’m trying to pick out light fixtures.”
The shopping gender gap, or some derivation of it, also influenced the way we dealt with the project’s punch list. Kevin was willing to overlook a crooked soffit or a misplaced light switch if it meant getting the workmen out of our house. Whereas, I wanted every flaw to be fixed, further delaying our completion date.
Both of us wanted the project behind us, not so much so we could live in the house but so we could stop fighting about it. “I’m worried I’m putting too much faith in the house to solve our problems,” Kevin admitted to me late one night.
We moved into the house just hours before a big snowstorm hit the city. The kitchen cabinets had yet to be installed and the floors were covered in construction dust, but we both knew we needed to be in the house more than we needed a picture-perfect reveal. The fighting didn’t cease, but it did gradually subside as we unpacked and the construction traffic slowed.
When we’d been in the house two months, Kevin went to Europe on business and convinced me to meet him in Paris for a long weekend. With the house a safe distance away, I asked him why he thought the renovation had been so hard on us. “For me,” he said, “it was being responsible for upholding a standard I never fully understood.”
Had my standards been too high, too elusive? I had wanted cabinets, tile and light fixtures that would last forever. Because that’s how long I want to live in this house with him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rachel Beanland works at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond and lives in an old row home in The Fan with her husband and three children. The couple bought the house in 2007 and renovated it in 2016. They will celebrate their 14th wedding anniversary this June.
