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A house that’s 115 years old requires constant vigilance, repairs, upgrades and refurbishing. No sooner is the big kitchen remodel finally finished than the upstairs shower leaks into the kitchen, the carpets look dingy and a brown streak oozes down a wall when it rains. The paint is peeling on the windows that were new not that long ago — let’s see, has it really been 20 years?
There’s a strange time warp with house renovations, where the project and its decisions and upheaval take over your life for what feels like endless weeks, producing a shiny new outcome that ought to last the rest of your lives. Weirdly, it always seems like only a few months have passed until that same project shows signs of wear. “Why is the varnish chipping on my new kitchen cupboards? It’s only been a few years since we installed them. That was 2009, I think, which is only — how is it 15 years already?”
My husband, Paul, could fix and build almost anything in his day, but his left arm was paralyzed in a fall six years ago.
He is still able to replace an electrical outlet, like the one in the bathroom that suddenly buzzed and rattled on a Sunday morning last summer. We turned off the breaker as hundreds of ants came pouring out from behind the fixture. Inside, we found a whole colony, a dreadful multigenerational household, with hundreds of eggs, larvae, parents, siblings and grandmas.
Paul can also fix cupboard doors that suddenly fall off, smoke alarms that beep desperately and light fixtures that suddenly expire, especially if I help hold things in place while he twists wires or revs his electric drill.
But he is no longer able to replace showers or repair the washer or install Sheetrock, so we call in repairmen for that, generally cheerful young men in beards and Carhartts who arrive early and stay all day, hauling supplies from their van, answering my husband’s questions and appearing suddenly outside the windows.
I feel like I’m turning into Sarah Winchester, heiress of the Winchester rifle fortune, an eccentric woman who designed a giant house in San Jose, California, and had workmen constantly present and hammers pounding for 38 years.
Legend says Sarah believed the noise would keep ghosts from bothering her, but historical sources say she simply liked architecture and design as well as supplying work for the carpenters, so she kept the project going year after year, constantly building, tearing down and rebuilding.
Unlike Sarah, I dread house renovations. I know the repairs are necessary, and I am grateful for people who show up and do a good job. They have never made me feel unsafe, yet their presence in and around my house is weirdly unsettling. They are neither residents who own the space nor guests who sit politely in the living room. Instead, they are like mice who suddenly take over the house, scuttling into messy closets and corners, scuffling and tapping behind walls and flitting past when I least expect them.
My love of privacy overrides my gratitude.
Back in COVID times, we somehow thought it would be a good idea to update the downstairs bathroom and office while we had almost all of our adult kids living at home. Adding construction guys to this already crowded situation was upsetting for all of us except Paul, who loved the action and discussions about plumbing and joists. I would make a pot of tea and my youngest daughter, Jenny, and I would huddle in the pantry for a moment of privacy and quiet to drink it together and calm down.
A year or so after that, the pipe from the well to the house developed a major leak, and we not only had workmen around the house but a big roaring machine digging a trench in the yard.
We took a break from major projects for a few years, but recently a number of deteriorating components demanded our attention. The upstairs shower had leaked into the kitchen for several years, but so sporadically that we always blamed it on the person in the shower. As the kids moved out, it was easy to ignore.
But it still bothered me, so I replied to an online ad, and soon an earnest salesman sat in our living room for far too long and finally told us that we could put a new shower in that tiny space for only $20,000.
Every other option looked appealing after that, so we hired a local company, leading to more young men up and down the stairs, tape measures in hand, and then another van in the driveway and large shower walls maneuvering up our narrow stairs.
The shower is lovely. The men were polite. I am grateful. It all gave me deep anxiety.
The wood on the rail of our wraparound porch has been deteriorating badly the last few summers. Like so many issues around the house, it gets much more complicated structurally if you ignore it. We called our favorite siding guy, and this week two men showed up to cover the wide rail with a nice white aluminum wrap. Their pounding hammers sounded like someone knocking on the door, which kept me jumpy all day.
My husband was late flying in from a work trip that night, so we didn’t get to bed until midnight, impossibly late for people in their 60s. The next morning, not only was the younger Mr. Siding on the front porch promptly at 8 a.m., but a Wi-Fi repairman was at the back door at exactly the same time, alert and eager to connect our Starlink unit on the barn to the rest of the property.
I did not match their enthusiasm.
Mr. Siding pounded expertly just outside the living room windows, and Mr. Wi-Fi flitted past the windows when I tried to take a nap in our son Ben’s old room, hoping for a bit of quiet.
The porch rail is finished, and it looks beautiful. The Wi-Fi guy had to order another part and will be back in a few days to complete his work. Surely these fixes will last for years and years, the house and everything in it are up to date, and I won’t have another construction guy pounding in my house for many years.
But I’ve been noticing that the vinyl flooring downstairs looks chipped and worn, even though my husband installed it only recently, like in, let’s see, maybe 2003?
Just call me Sarah Winchester.
