Messy in the Middle
A return to writing. A bathroom renovation. A new window.
I’ve not been writing for months and feel bad about it the way I feel bad about not flossing my teeth. Which is to say I’ve been luxuriating in my lack of focus, binge watching shows on Netflix and Hulu (Only Murders in the Building is so stupid by I love it!), aware on some level that if I don’t write, my mind will slowly decay. The inciting incident to my hiatus is my home laptop has been broken for months. It is now fixed, sporting a brand-new battery — which I tried to lobby for an entirely new computer but was told not right now. And my husband is right, we’ve had a number of expenses recently, not least of which is our bathroom renovation, nearly a month later still not finished — plastic covering the new vanities and fixtures. It looks very much like a project abandoned, a dream forgotten.
The trouble is we had to stop the bathroom project to do another unforeseen project — which is to move and replace the window which sits over the tub. The window, it turns out, it a few inches off, a quirk left by the original hands that built this house. I am not an exacting person, because like Bob Ross, I believe in happy accidents. The world is chaotic, so why not lean into that a little with a window that is slightly off? Not believing in perfect or exact makes me unsuitable for a host of jobs. I thought, for example, that I wanted to be a technical writer, since I enjoy writing, but found that being a stickler for the rules of grammar in a technical report is a little boring, so that didn’t work out for me. Thankfully, I am at the age where I am beginning to lean into who I am.
Who I am didn’t necessary care about the window, but my husband did. He has wanted to change that window out since we first bought the house, so I was happy to go along with the plan. (He is a planner by profession, and works on things called master plans; I call him my Man with the Master Plan). But the plan has gone awry, as plans do. We contacted a general contractor we’ve worked with before, who had someone who could do the specialized window work. The guy told us it could be done in a day or two. We were excited because we could not proceed with the rest of the work, like placing the tub, until the window was fixed. Well, every day for a week, the guy texted he was showing up in twenty minutes and then failed to materialize.
You would think that after the first ghosting, we would have fired him, but we were desperate to get the work done now, today– it would only take a day if we could just get him to come back! This situation was giving me dating horror story flashbacks of long banished, unwelcome emotions. The guy’s tools were left in our garage, so he must be coming back! Just like the pile of action figures and a game console left at my apartment years ago by an emotionally unavailable boyfriend meant that surely he must still love me.
Long story short, the guy was fired by the general contractor and we found out additional details about the guy’s circumstances that are unsettling to say the least. Now I am pondering his life, worried for him, borrowing his trouble when all we wanted was a new window. Maybe that is a new window, a more accurate window.
Funny part is I never even actually met the guy and my mind is chasing after his story like he is the March Hare. Best not to follow. And so (now that I’ve told you in general terms the story) I am editing our story of our bathroom renovation. Oh, it took months longer than expected, I’ll say, glass of wine in hand, gesturing at the new glass block window, which you’ll note does not allow a clear view of the outside. It’s never as easy as they make it look on HGTV.
