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Pique n' Your Interest

Never ending renovations not so romantic

It seemed like a good plan at first – buying a 25-year-old condo in Whistler in desperate need of renovation.

Being first time homeowners we thought this was going to be a grand adventure for us, a time for us to bond, work together, and rebuild the perfect house, making it our home.

What fools we were.

With three and a half months in the new house I can safely say there’s still a lot of fake wood panelling on the walls and, sadly, the stucco isn’t getting any smaller.

Home renovations don’t seem as romantic as they once did.

We started zealously enough. It’s easy enough to rip apart the hall walls and cart the crap to the landfill, especially in the middle of January when there's non-stop torrential rain and no powder anywhere.

Our first project was drywalling, which I might add, is not a good way to start off any renovations. Drywalling has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever and if we had more money I would have no qualms about paying the professionals to do it. Unfortunately we're renovating on a budget, which is another way of saying we're doing everything ourselves.

I think I first turned against the whole idea of drywalling when I realized just how heavy it was to lift from the car and up the stairs.

I got a sigh and a withering look when I asked if we could lift it one sheet at a time.

Couldn’t I suck it up and at least try to lift two sheets at a time, for crying out loud. Bend with your legs! Bend with your legs!

Our drywalling day was not getting off to an auspicious beginning.

The relationship was tested further upon installing the first piece. He held it up and I was in charge of the electric drill.

But who knew there was a reverse function on electric drills? Apparently I was the only one in the dark.

It took me a good 10 minutes to figure it out as he held a large piece of drywall over his head.

Drilling, I might add, isn’t as easy as it looks, especially on a ladder with the added pressure of getting the job done quickly.

Needless to say I was quickly removed from drilling duty and charged instead with holding up the drywall.

Some nasty words and name-calling was exchanged in the meantime about my ineptness and his impatience.

I quickly recalled my home renovating dream. I didn't want our renovations to be the cause of any domestic strife. We were going to have fun doing this, dammit, whether we liked it or not.

I apologized for the name-calling and explained that because this was our first home I just wanted everything to be perfect.

By the time it came to putting up the second piece of drywall, the one I was holding up, I couldn't care less about perfection.

Instead of achieving excellence I was perfectly willing to slap it up on the wall. This was the hallway after all; nobody would be examining this drywall in minute detail.

As a first time drywaller little did I know that this was just the beginning of the process. There was still mudding to do, and taping, followed by sanding, followed by more mudding, more taping and more sanding. How do boys innately know how to do these things?

If you haven't yet experienced the joys of sanding drywall, I'm here to tell that that it's not something you have to do in this lifetime. It's dirty and chalky and it gets up your nose.

So here we are at the priming stage. The first coat of paint is on the walls and we still have another two or three layers to go.

The monumental task of picking a colour for the hall walls is now ahead of us. Do we go with beige, light brown, tan, off-white? Oh the decisions.

Personally, I like to pick colours based on their names.

There's just something so much nicer about using "inukshuk" as our paint than "beige". I don't think my boyfriend feels quite the same way about my method of choosing paint. Another argument could be brewing.

Of course, once the hallway is done, the rest of the house awaits.

There's tiling and re-carpeting and installing baseboards all ahead of us, not to forget more drywalling and sanding.

It's a monumental task.

That first day we ripped down the hall walls a friend said to us that we had just started a 10-year project. I scoffed at him. Don't be ridiculous I said. This will be done by the summer.

Now I'm left wondering where the winter has gone.

And so I have resigned myself to the project. I've accepted the mess.

Tripping over ladders, squeezing past the dryer in the middle of the hall, and having a thin white layer of dust on all our clothes has just become part of our normal routine. Renovating is how we live. It turns out that it's a lot of hard work and there's nothing romantic about it!