Bricks and Torture

Sledgehammers smash walls and send my stomach through the floor. Bricks bleed and permeate the air with diaphanous dust that smothers nasal hair. Windows shudder. Floorboards groan. My house is hurting and I feel the trauma. 

Three months into a renovation and I’m yet to feel the love for this cavernous money pit. 

 

The heavens have opened, saturating the exposed site and washing piles of sawdust and grit down the driveway. Amputated architraves scream in silence and dangling cables hold naked bulbs, their filaments long extinguished. 

 

It’s agonising to be ‘on site’, surrounded by skirting boards unsheathed, wall plaster ripped asunder and metal roofing peeled back. Hall carpet stripped off like a band aid reveals virgin timber covered in knots. Its rawness is real.

 

I medicate by trying to envisage a new environment. Sprouting north from the 1900-built carapace will be a new heart of the home: an open kitchen with a lifted section of roof and swathes of windows and doors providing a different perspective outside.

 

Everything old will be new again. But I’ve been blindsided by a sentimental seam that runs deeper than Sydney sandstone. It’s so hard to let go.

 

I miss the cosy kitchen layout with flaking chipboard, dripping taps and a stiletto-scarred cork floor. The separate loo at the end of the hallway has gone as has the laundry bathroom with a red ceiling. The rusty Vulcan bar heater in the bathroom will no longer warm my back.

 

When dewy eyed I find solace in a bedroom, one of few spared from the upheaval. From this battlement and bolthole I plot a life beyond lockup. Surrounded by bedlinen, towels, a wash bag, my bike and other necessities, it resembles an indoor campsite without a shower block. Although the builders have erected a temporary outdoor dunny which I’m keen to keep.

 

I find resisting the cookie-cutter approach to renovating is futile, at least in part, for a heated floor and a stone benchtop hailing Caesar are The Block-like choices keeping me on trend. But whilst I embrace a custom-made kitchen, glitzy bathroom and all the hallmarks that shout “modern living”, my wish to retain is more valuable than any retention sum.

 

A tactile section of exposed brick lintel, a sash window offering a glimpse of what was and a draw containing mum’s wooden spoon are some items that will remain of the old kitchen: the place where meals were served and punishments dished out.

 

Dormant asbestos fibres in the veranda ceiling are feeling my love as I ferret about and rescue red cedar architraves and scarred skirting boards, pleading a case for their reuse.

 

Even the smallest item contributes to my torment. Deciding to replace a simple window latch that has gripped itself to a sill is a pain, and conundrum. Why change it? I fought and won the battle to maintain the lath and plaster ceiling and manhole in the bathroom, and lost mountains of sleep over the decision to rip up perfectly acceptable floorboards.

 

My nostalgia is routed in the lily pily tree that has tightly held the family plot together for close to 100 years. Sadly, parts of the garden are also suffering. The red hibiscus planted in 1959 is dying. I’m watching it wilt and turn a gangrenous shade of yellow before inevitably reaching for a saw and amputating limb by limb. Green waste indeed.

 

The poignancy of its demise is cathartic, for I acknowledge the need to renew, plot a new path and make this place my own. I live in a suburb where the demolition of dwellings has spawned a building pandemic so it should be easy to adopt the ‘change is good’ mantra. Yet I find it unbearable.

 

At least the bananas are blooming. Saved from extinction along the boundary fence, I’ve replanted them in a place where they first produced fruit. Their languid leaves channel thoughts of the tropics in a garden that grows on a restful canvas of green. It's better tonic than Seasol.

 

Laminated beams, steel posts and sleek sections of cliplock roof are solid, characterless necessities which will pin the house together long after I have fallen apart.

 

While the house undergoes a major operation, it’s Sally the architect who has saved me from toppling into the skip – a crude steel coffin that lies beneath the veranda. She has guided me down the hallways, gently dissuading and persuading at every doorstop. Consulted, never corralled. Decisions ultimately in my hands and project managed by her as we strive to achieve a shared grand design.

 

We all have one build in us. This is mine. For I will not rise again to the challenge, nor I suspect will this house.