Renovation Dreams

This week they are painting.  M's room has bright blue walls and lime green eaves.  There was skepticism, but it looks fabulous.  E's room has three violet walls and one fuschia.  Again: skepticism disproved.  In our room, I was aiming for a barely there blue green.  It turned out more there than I intended.  But S and the girls think it's perfect, and, once I inhabit it, I'm sure I'll soon forget about my intentions.

The space is now finished enough to imagine living in it.  The six-foot-long, 22-inch-deep tub is in place, and I dream of lying back, hot water to my chin, looking up at my skylight.  In my dreams, the tub is clean.  Now, the hall, bathroom, ceilings and trim are a bright white (Simply White, if you know your Benjamin Moore), the trim is shiny, the angles are sharp, and it all looks impeccably modern and clean.  I imagine that once we move up there, we will live in bright, light cleanliness.

But alas, I know we will still be us, and the dust will collect in the cracks, the shoes will lie abandoned in the hall, the steps will become staging points for things we want to take upstairs, some day, and the books, oh god, the books will pile up and fall down again, into sprawling, open-paged heaps, just as they do in every other room of the house.

A new house, even half a new house, offers such promise, such hope of being different: new space, new beginning, new life.  

I don't really have an ending to this post.  To lament the inevitable failure would be to bemoan how we are, which really isn't that bad.  To embrace it would be to accept how we are, and really we should be better.  To say that it will not be as I imagine, but it will be...itself, great, whatever...can only be trite.  So I'll just say that, whatever happens, the blue, lime green, violet, and fuschia will be perfect.