The home improvement project begins with the simple desire to improve your home.
The particular improvement you have in mind is fairly ambitious. Not as ambitious as the long-fantasized-about conversion of your attic to a master suite, office and playroom complex that also will discreetly contain the large plastic toys now scattered about your house. Still, it is a project that will require the use of safety goggles.
You would like a bench seat in your kitchen. The bench would allow your family to eat together without placing someone’s back within striking distance of the refrigerator door. Properly designed, it would also feature storage for a few large plastic toys.
When you broach the bench with your husband, he says, “I could make that.”
This is his response to many of your attempts to purchase items for your home. Your husband has offered to build you a coffee table, covers for your radiators and a bed. You are grateful your husband does not know how to sew.
The fact is that your husband could make a bench. The question is whether he will. An abyss lies beyond the conditional.
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Your husband has built one other item in your home. It is an item that cost hundreds of dollars in the fancy home magazine you subscribe to. You were filling out the order form for this item when your husband looked over your shoulder and said, “I could make that.”
He did make it. Some 11 months later.
Now the quarter sawn oak “cloud lift” motif valance, modeled upon one in the famed Gamble House in Pasadena, Calif., stands in silent, beautiful defiance in your dining room.
It does not matter that your basement contains a light fixture purchased for your bathroom 18 months ago. Or that the wall-mount speaker for your stereo system sits on a side table. The valance says to all who admire it that, in this house, lives a man who can build things.
Your husband undertakes the bench. He makes many lengthy trips to various hardware and home improvement stores. You stay at home and care for your children. He must go alone, he says, to devote his full attention to the highly complex task of selecting lumber.
He makes more trips to buy the expensive tools that are essential for this project. He then returns those tools for different tools.
At one point, you estimate that your husband has made 11 trips to Home Depot and spent a sum roughly equal to that of a decent leather club chair. You do not mention this in case your husband offers to make you a club chair.
During a family visit, your husband enlists the help of his father, who also has been known to improve his home.
The two men disappear into the basement workroom for hours at a time. Occasionally, they emerge in masks designed to protect the wearer from sawdust. You take this as a promising sign.
After one especially long and loud session, they announce that they now know exactly what they are going to do. You do not take this as a promising sign.
Soon, the bench assumes an identity of mythic proportion. You ask your 2-year-old son if he knows what kind of work his father does, and he answers, “Work on the bench.”
You continue to eat dinner at the inadequate kitchen table. Except now, the trim on the walls has been removed for some mysterious exercise involving the measurement of the mythic bench, and this corner of the kitchen looks like it has been chewed by giant rodents. The kitchen remains in this state for several months.
You realize that your attempt to improve your home has resulted in its deterioration. You try to find some philosophical meaning in that. You wonder why you have started referring to yourself in the second person.
Drawing upon your potty-training expertise, you look for incentives to get the job done. Stickers will not work. You try promises. Threats. You bet your husband a fancy dinner that he cannot complete the bench by a certain date. The date passes.
Finally, you are reduced to using the nuclear weapon in your arsenal. You go public.
Then you wait.
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Columns by Tribune staff reporters Steve Johnson and Louise Kiernan ([email protected]), who are husband and wife, appear in this space on alternating weeks.