Maintenance madness
When the maintenance team is done, and the painters have left, and the house is spick and span, you could be forgiven for heaving a sigh of relief because you can get back to life and routine as you knew it before renovations began. Right? Wrong. Because your chores are just beginning. A flurry of phone calls to find somebody to fill the cushions, repair geysers, replace broken locks and handles. Hasty trips to upholsterers to bring back swatches of fabrics that keep vanishing. Roller blinds or curtains? Furniture varnish or polish? Teak or tan?
Banish the sofas to the balcony so the carpenter can have a go at at the same time that the shampo team wants to lather up an ocean of soapsuds. The electricians are in to rip open lines to repair sockets and add electric points. There is a great moving about of furniture along fresh alignments. Have the lampshades been changed? If someone’s running errands to the hardware store, why not order new faucets and shower heads, towel racks and toilet paper holders? And the measuring — always the measuring — of curtain lengths and sheers. See through blinds or blackout options? Manual or electric?
Putting back the art on the walls, now that’s a task. There are canvases that need restoration and paintings that need reframing. What about mounts? Acid-free paper or archival? Glass fronts or acrylic? Which walls, what works? Paresh Maity next to Jamini Roy? Abstracts or figuratives? The measuring of walls and calculation of spaces, the whirring of drills and the thud of hammers as the plaster falls apart. And always the changes, the rethinking and resetting, and holes in the walls that will need sealing and repainting barely days after the painters have moved out.
And still, work in the house seems never finished. Now’s the time for turning out what lay inside chests and closets to displace what worked as a method, even through a system of madness. So, pull out the dishes and replace them with linen, into which space the cutlery won’t, alas, fit. Summer wardrobes and winter clothes in a mess on beds and on the floor. Shoe cabinets replaced by bookshelves, the spring-cleaned duvets providing a nestling corner for the dog whose nervousness had led to his nipping at unsuspecting ankles, requiring an outlay of hush money for ointments and as bribe. An outing of cases of alcohol secreted away against dry days or potential prohibition imposed by a zealous government, the finding and poring over of family albums that eat into already precious time, and dozing over spilled toiletries.
Will it never end, this madness that has displaced the earlier method, so the bank papers are now to be found in the socks drawer, the bank loan files stowed in the washing machine — and does anyone know where the blood pressure medicine is? The books from the bedside are missing, the Kindle is misplaced, the cook can’t find the tea bags. We have more mobile phone chargers than we started with, but fewer handsets. Somebody decided to move the storage for the towels out of the bathroom so I had to dry myself using my — oh, never mind. There are guests for dinner tonight but the sofas are still damp from the shampooing. Or maybe the dog just made a mess. I’m hoping they’ll find a way to cope, as we do. At any rate, I know where the whisky — now, if only I could find the glasses too.