Before we get into this week’s post on relationships and renovations—along with an uplifting documentary I highly recommend, and the dishes my kids and I are making for Father’s Day—here’s a recent snapshot from the Ojai house! We’ve had some big improvements the last little while that I’m excited to share with you soon.
Photography by Victoria Pearson
House renovations are known to spawn divorces, but no one talks about renovation as a way to build stronger bonds.
Tad and I have been together for 25 years, and have worked on renovations or home improvements for most of that time. He would never have chosen to take on so many projects, but he has come to appreciate that refurbishing spaces brings me joy and eases my anxieties. And he always likes living in the spaces once they are (finally) done! Well, except that in my mind they’re never really done.
While we still joke about the time he expressed shock that a lamp could cost more than $60, he, too, now cares about the look and feel of our home. His obsessions are fewer than mine but each project has peeled back another layer of Tadness that I never knew about.
A little bit about Tad, as you haven’t heard much about him yet: He’s a journalist and writer for The New Yorker. He works on long stories that take months to report and write, on topics from the Golden Gate Bridge’s suicide magnet to Sam Altman’s ambitions to Donald Glover’s audacious storytelling. So his days vary between reading a lot of books for background research, traveling to witness something happening and interview the protagonists, following up with lengthy Zooms, and then weeks of outlining and writing. We are currently in Brooklyn, and our kids are home from college for the summer, so he’s holed up in our bedroom, perched on our bed, writing a long story about longevity. I remind him that writing in bed didn’t do much for Proust’s longevity (dead at 51). He’s looking forward to having his own study in Ojai.
Tad is happy living simply. He likes a good armchair, a plug-and-play coffee set-up, and doing the “Times” Spelling Bee. He’s not big on fixing things—it was a shock when he repaired the garbage disposal recently—but he stays on top of vexing matters like insurance and pest control; he stocks up on household supplies, especially toothpaste (I haven’t figured out what drives his toothpaste anxiety yet, but we have time for that); and he’s always ahead of me doing laundry, emptying the dishwasher, and making our bed.
Early in our marriage, I struggled with his general lack of interest in the design details coupled with his occasional forceful opinions. I’m an all-in person so I used to approach projects like a hard-core football coach. If you weren’t thinking about every detail, then you weren’t allowed to sub into the game, and you definitely couldn’t call a play. This didn’t produce marital bliss, surprisingly.
Tad is less ambitious about design; he doesn’t see it as an exploration of self-expression but as a minimum set of requirements for family comfort and happiness. But he’s clear about the things he does like (spacious bathrooms, reading nooks, and a bench to sit on when putting on his shoes). As I’ve eased off the gas and listened more closely to his points of view, he’s become more interested in new ideas. The more he has opened up, the more I’ve become eager to make sure that all the details he cares about have been addressed. The projects we’ve done in recent years have left us both feeling more connected. Like most life lessons, you later think: “Duh.”
I’ve also learned that home projects aren’t about getting my vision to “win” but about bringing us closer and creating a home that feels like us.
Things I’ve discovered about Tad through renovations. He:...
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