RANTING | In which I talk about the Spring 2020 One Room Challenge (ORC), decorating my pink bathroom, and my tendency to make people hate me. 

Oh hi. It’s week three of the ORC and I am back again, ostensibly to talk about my progress on the pink bathroom, but … alas (for you), I’m really here to talk about something else.

Look, I don’t have enough content to fill eight weeks of blog posts on updating my bathroom. I just don’t. I can’t. It’s not possible because I’m not renovating.

I’m always decorating. I’m almost never renovating.

And now I will say the thing that will make a whole bunch of people mad: I think 75% of the time, people SHOULDN’T be renovating. There’s too much dang renovating going on!

Sometimes I think we forget what an incredible privilege it is to own property. I still can’t believe I managed to buy a house. By the time we found this one, I had given up hope that I would ever own anything.

Five years ago we lived in one of the most expensive cities in the world, where very small, very run-down family homes (and frankly, full-on crack dens) routinely cost $1M. The idea that we could ever own was laughable. I was lucky. I had a really decent apartment with a great landlord who wasn’t a greedy Capitalist dirtbag about raising our rent. Things were pretty good, and I was grateful to have two bedrooms and a postage stamp-sized area of grass out front that we could afford. Then life conspired to move us to a much more affordable city. My parents chipped in, and not-so-long-story-even-shorter … now I have a whole damn house. It’s not nothing. It’s like winning the lottery of life. That’s what it is to own a home.

Other than the light fixture, which I got on clearance, every single thing in this photo was second-hand or thrifted.

It’s not that I don’t have the urge to renovate. But I OWN a HOUSE. Shouldn’t that be enough?

It also not that I don’t love me some aspirational content. I do! I swear I WANT to see beautiful spaces and wonderful transformations. It’s fun. And we need fun. Not everything has to be about doing and having only what we NEED. That kind of austerity is empty. Things we just want because we want them are valuable too. And I don’t hate change. I especially love restorations. And there are plenty of good renovations out there, too (and lots of you are doing them for the ORC). Sometimes we need change, sometimes we need more space, sometimes we need to fix what isn’t working. But a lot of the time, we really really don’t. And right now, I really don’t.

Yeah. So this is why people hate me (or rather, one of the many reasons): I think a lot of renovations are stupid.

On the whole, I think contemporary North Americans are pathologically addicted to creating trash.

And to trashing things. It’s weird and wasteful and silly and I don’t want to do it. AGAIN, I fully get the urge. When I am new to a place, my first instinct is always to CHANGE EVERYTHING. I want to gut the mother! Make my dreams come true! But inevitably, I know that if I settle down and chill the F out, several things will happen:

1. I will change my mind about what I initially wanted and anything I did in haste will go to waste.
2. I will adapt and the things I thought were unliveable or ugly will cease to bother me. (They may even become some of my favourite features.)
3. Life will happen and my precious pennies will be needed for other things. Things that cannot wait.

In this house, all three of these things happened.

I made some early changes that I have since completely abandoned. They weren’t major, but nonetheless, I now see those hasty decisions as a dreadful waste. I also came in here hating things like the pink bathroom (not because of the pink, but because there is NO storage and it seemed so grody and impossible), but three years in, I’ve just adapted and now it works fine. And, most importantly, in the meantime, we have needed to do some pressing and expensive work that included a new roof and a new water heater (which decided to basically explode one winter’s day on a damn whim). Goodbye $10K. I feel lucky as hell that I had it on hand.

I’m a fun-sponge, okay?

It’s not like I want to be this way. Maybe I’m a curmudgeon at heart or maybe I’ve been worn into this grumpy, judgmental creature, who knows. But it is true that I can really suck the fun out of things. That’s what I’m doing right now, I guess.

I’ve long been a pain in the whole ass about pointing out and dwelling on the things nobody seems to want to talk about. There is a LOT of seriously dark shit going on in our world right now. I can’t put any of it out my mind. I’ve tried, I just can’t. And I also can’t disregard it any of it to run out to the paint store, or the hardware store, or the lumber yard. I can’t hire some tradesperson to come into my house when I feel deeply that we should all be social and physical distancing as much as possible. It seems selfish and insane and myopic and I can’t turn my brain off about it. So that is definitely having a big effect on the pink bathroom project.

Like, do I WANT the walls to be green? I don’t even know. But green paint is what I have and I want to transform the bathroom, so here we are.

I initially bought the can of green paint I am using in the bathroom to do this colour block feature wall project. Then I used it for the striped wall in the header image as well. There’s still plenty left!

LOOK, fun-sponging aside, every house can be a forever home if you work at it a bit!

My house is old. It’s got plenty of annoying issues and lots of imperfections. But I just … deal with it. Because HOLY SHIT, I OWN A HOUSE. And also, I spent every penny I had on it. I don’t really have any more pennies, and even if I did, I don’t want to blow up my pink bathroom. I don’t even want to blow up my “pee and poo” bathroom (that’s the yellow and brown one, y’all). They are PERFECTLY GOOD FUCKING BATHROOMS, OKAY?

So. Eep! Do you hate me now? I’m sorry. I truly am.

The pink bathroom IS going to be transformed.

With decorating. With paint, mostly. Paint I already have and that features in the photos in today’s post. And a shower curtain. And other little DIY tricks and hacks. Decor, baby. This is a transformation that is all about decor. I should adopt it as a sort of motto: Don’t renovate! Decorate!

I’m reading Lindy West’s latest book The Witches Are Coming right now, and there is a throwaway line at the end of one of the early chapters that jumped out at me:

“We escape into home renovation shows because it’s easier to imagine an apolitical world where everyone can afford a house than it is to actually build that world.”

Dang. I felt ATTACKED, as the kids say. But like, deservedly. Like, I deserve that.

I promise I’ll post a better update next week. And I will continue to work on being a better person. And on my house. Maybe. 😉