The Purgatory of Construction

In the eternal life cycle of construction, heaven is the finished product – the gleaming floorboards, the graceful curtains fluttering gently out from a breeze that pours through tall windows, matte walls that illuminate chosen pieces of art by their subtlety, steam curling upwards from a tall mug of tea (unfettered by dust) posed on a three-legged table next to the loveseat, where a lucky soul is draped with book in hand. A domestic nirvana.

Hell is the week upon week of drilling, banging, sawing, shouting, hammering, scraping, demolishing, smoking, interrupting.  It is the dust that covers every utensil unlucky enough to be left exposed in the kitchen, that covers every chair in the living space, every soap, toothbrush, lotion container, every article of clothing left drying in the laundry room.  It is the sand and pebbles on the bathroom floor that can never be completely removed, except by the bare wet feet that exit the warm tub.  Hell is the waiting, the waiting – the putting one’s life on hold, hoping that one day peace will come, but never being entirely sure.

And purgatory is the weekends spent in construction, when no one is there but family, and yet evidence that your life is on hold unavoidably crowds your view.  Workers’ sweat pants are shoved into the bookcase, the saw horses hold planks full of tools, and circle saws lean against the chimney.  The tools get a weekend’s break, but not you.  Nothing is comfortable – you have to vacuum the chairs and table before you can enjoy a repast.  Peanut is necessarily and unhappily restrained in some way because he can’t explore the terrain of danger (on all fours).  Young Lady and Young Knight are drawing pictures on the dust wherever they find it and using the temporary iron support beam as a maypole.  And we just sit at the table, staring at one another in bewilderment, not daring to even rest our elbows on it for fear of dust.

As in life, weekends in construction purgatory contain bits of heaven and bits of hell.

Heaven would be the moment yesterday when I walked upstairs and inhaled deeply.  The landing was parqueted, and it was the last little bit of space that had been waiting for its oak floorboards.  It was finally complete.  Even though I cannot yet look across the floor and see a stretch of gleaming floorboards because the natty carpets are still in place to protect the floors from plaster, and even though when lifting up the rugs the old and new floorboards joined together look like chocolate and vanilla ice cream, still I see promise.  Just pausing on the landing and taking in the spacious room, seeing no more potholes under the carpet or anywhere else on the floor, well it warmed my heart.

The hell in construction purgatory would be a small, unrelated thing like coming home from teaching English in the rain and having to look at, look away from, side-step and jump over so …. much …. dog poo!  I mean it’s like there was a dog marathon on that street, a cavalry who all decided to do their business on the same long stretch.  I know that dog poo is a necessary compromise for living in gay Paree (or any of its suburbs), but honestly, except for a brief respite it is unavoidably in … your … face.  You don’t dare look away for fear you’ll step in it (and traipse it across the new flooring) or worse yet, slide in it and go down rump first, most likely into a nearby mound.  And you don’t dare look at it for fear your breakfast will come up, especially when the rain makes everything soggy, which doesn’t help.  My apologies for the graphic description of canine ejections, which actually have nothing to do with my home or construction, but they remain little bits of hell in my current purgatory.

Although it does all seem to be nearing an end (we will need to spend next weekend at the in-laws so the workers can prepare the “bouquet”, the grand finale to the fireworks display of construction chaos), who can say that we mere mortals will have done enough penance?  The staircase can be a slippery slope downwards, the newly installed pipes as risky as the river Acheron, and Cerberus has already made his presence known – everywhere!   We are bereft of our control over this so-called paradise, and we have no Virgil as our guide.

* This post originally appeared in my former blog, Perfect Welcome, and may contain some modifications or discrepancies in the names or comments.

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