Article by Bella Nevin Art by Kristopher Ligtenberg
Plastic oozed with layers of clotted popcorn ceiling lined up in our garage that summer. Lockdown had left the neighborhood apricots to ferment in the high-altitude sun, their sweetness heady and thickening with wildfire smoke.
“I’m just trying to make it look nice.”
We redid the ceilings.
My mother eventually bought herself some goggles somewhere along the job. Then eventually a mask. My sister, maybe growing stir-crazy and sick of the popcorn ceilings, finally convinced her to remove the popcorn which was unfortunately slapped on every ceiling in the house. All it took was an intense water sprayer, a scraper, and the ceilings were made new. But the process needed a willing participant to hold a plastic bag above their head and catch the congealed droplets as they fell. She worked with a meditative rhythm, like it sustained her. Spray, scrape. Spray, scrape. I didn’t hold the bag right, so I was demoted.
My sister ended up taking most of these shifts.
Renovation meant cyclical trips to Lowe’s, and watching YouTube tutorials on my mom’s 11-year-old Microsoft computer, which whirred and huffed under the devoted scraping, priming, caulking, and painting. The furniture was sheathed away, the windows were protected, and the living room was aglow with the sheen of thick plastic.
The chair facing the southern window, with the “million dollar view” we had stumbled into years ago, was covered up. Until then I had spent my empty days reading, snacking, and staring out from the wide Southwestern-patterned seat. When I was smaller I used to lay in, on, and over it, always remembering how it held me just right. But the house had work to do, and it was covered now.
“I’m gonna relish my time off, it’s called use the drill.”
It was how-to transcendence. We cheered as the last bits of popcorn downstairs were auspiciously shaved, bagged, and carried away. We each came out of our rooms and back from the dog-walking and hiking, converging on the house, staking a claim.
It wasn’t our house I suppose; Mom still sent checks to a man out in Iowa, part of the first family there who had grown up and left — just as my sister and I would, as high school slid away into lockdown.
Floors
The carpet was ripped away leaving every staple that the builders had haphazardly gunned into the wood plank floors. My sister and I crouched with hammers and removed each one in whatever line we could form from the speckles of nails and staples. I remembered the red shag carpet originally in its place when we toured the house many years ago; now it was gone without a trace. KMTS country music played over the radio. We laughed.
Mom bought the supplies for redoing the floors and pack upon pack of vinyl flooring, all of which she nailed in and measured herself, while my sister and I took turns on standby with instruments for her work. No, we did not buy wood floors and, no, we absolutely did not hire someone to help. My sister’s friend asked at one point why we didn’t. Her family had built their home on prime riverside real estate out of thin air. We had the bones of an old '70s house, lingering from when there were orchards, not doctors in pool houses, in the neighborhood. Our home’s renewal was hodgepodged, DIY, and by the skin of our teeth, as some things always had been. But maybe — and to my sister, definitely — our home could look clean-cut, with bright whites and clean fixings, as these new houses and new people did.
Kitchen, Walls
My contribution was the sage green that we painted over early 80s cabin-brown cabinets and fireplace, calming with the warm lighting we had installed above similarly retro countertops that not much could be done for. Laboratory overhead fluorescents begone!
Ripping away tan textured wallpaper, I chipped at layers of pattern, relics of trends tightly folded against the plaster. I scraped and found a red heart scrawled with names from the first family who lived here, sealed away for forty years. They had long since left. Did the plaster hold their laughter, their family meals, their cherry pies from the backyard tree, their high-functioning dysfunction? Or did these weave into the shag carpet that had been tossed away years ago?
We primed and painted the walls.
Bathroom, ceilings…
“See, I can be your mom and your dad,” Mom ironically quipped as she dislodged a ceiling fan, wearing a full painter’s suit and goggles. She moved like a force of nature; we always joked she could talk to the animals since the chickadees in the yard lept into her hands. She and my sister yelled about whether she was holding the ceiling droplet bag properly. Their work started before 8:00 AM most days. I went on lots of walks.
After months of painting, trimming, and finishing, the home was renewed, or at least its anatomy was. My sister and mother turned to new frontiers for transformation. I helped, albeit idly, while they learned plumbing basics, installing a new sink and bathtub in the downstairs bathroom. A new glass door was drilled into the house while I slogged through a virtual AP Physics exam. They took on amateur electrical work as they installed new ceiling fans in every room, and slowly began to refurbish, guided by the heather-gray and white hues of “modern” houses. Our colored glass chandelier was toppled by a black aluminum spherical fixture. Mom bought the house.
I started to feel dizzy. My chair found its new permanent home in the basement. It was tucked away from that “million dollar view” a man in cargo pants had appraised two months earlier for 'the market,' pocketing a postcard panorama. We had ritualistically excised what we didn’t like about the home, but I stepped back from many of my duties. All of the movement blurred into an in-between, and it seemed everything was just passing through. My last months in the ongoing newness of the house were spent blindly fixed on the horizon.
…
“I’m never gonna be a contractor, let’s put it that way.” I chuckle over the phone, after a pause. For the first time in months, my mom has a day off and has taken her pilgrimage to Lowe’s for another project. Years after my sister and I left, we came home to new fixtures. The momentum is relentless, and my surroundings adhere to some tacit uniform. New developments below the mountain. The tub has been replaced. New apartments along the highway. The bathroom has been retiled. Traffic where there never was. My bedroom has been refurbished, sheets and all.
I hear about the house, either as a bane of existence or a good find, endlessly renovated to sell it and hit the road, or covet it forever. The metronome steadily sways. Sometimes I miss it, but maybe in the way you miss what you can’t quite remember. Working two jobs and pouring over home projects, my mother’s motion never stops. Years later I search for some sort of peace in resting. Renovations, as I always hear, almost never go to plan, and there are always gaps and patches, crevices of some kind. If you squint you can see them. My mom isn’t a contractor, but she is a maker, for better and for worse. She made me, a sister, a life, an education, and a world she never had access to, but still stubbornly chips at tillings and trimmings. Maybe we’re all seeking newness, chasing sameness.
All I know is my chair is mine to take when I ask for it.