Couples Learn Remodeling the Abode Can Bring Trying Times
Pick a marriage, any marriage, and have its partners save an astronomical amount of money or send them to the bank to borrow this sum, creating a very scary family debt. Then force the couple to give the money to an architect.
Immediately after the money changes hands, subject the couple to relentless rounds of “The Newlywed Game” with the architect acting as inquisitor.
In this version of the game, there is no question too humiliating or too revealing. Bathroom behavior, bedtime behavior, favorite colors, habits, idiosyncrasies, all must be explored in detail, together, out loud, to hammer out a remodel design.
Finally, tear up the couple’s home, give keys to guys who will show up at 7 every morning and put cigarettes out on the windowsills. Turn off the water. Hang big plastic drapes in the living room and tarp the dining room. Fill the house with dust, noise and fumes. Tell the couple this will last for three months, take six and add some bucks to the original bill.
Ward and June Cleaver would fight. There isn’t a couple out there that wouldn’t. The fact is that a fair number of the couples who remodel their homes get divorced sometime during or after the work is done. Human nature is violated by the very process, and a modern marriage, already strained by the pressures of two full careers, is highly vulnerable to added stress.
“I burned out one marriage personally,” says architect Steven Ball, who put his first wife through four or five renovations before she was defeated and they were so distant they were strangers. “There is only so much dust and debris that anyone can be expected to handle.”
These battling couples aren’t suffering in silence. They are taking their renovation hassles to marriage counselors and family therapists. “Humans are creatures of habit,” explains UCLA professor of psychiatry and family counselor Irene Goldenberg, who sees more and more patients in the grips of remodels. “They can get used to a great many things, but it is difficult when the surroundings are in disarray. Even then, people can learn to live in the most difficult circumstances, provided they’re not feeling someone is taking advantage of them or their money is draining away.”
Unfortunately, remodeling is almost always tainted by that exact sensation, much like the vulnerability that seizes us when the car is in the shop, only the financial stakes are a lot higher. Before one Mandeville couple went to hear their final construction bids, they joked they were bringing along oxygen to revive each other
Most need the oxygen. If the couple hires an architect, they pay $30,000 to $50,000 for the remodel of a master suite, the most typical renovation. A kitchen costs $20,000 to $40,000. If they can afford to move out for the nine months a typical renovation can last, they can add $20,000 more for rent, storage and school fees to keep children in their own school. By bypassing an architect and going directly to a remodeling construction company, they can cut the fees by half. But cost overruns can be as high as 50%. “It seems $100,000 doesn’t go that far any more,” says Venice-based architect Tony Watson.
Most couples, of course, survive remodeling. They can emerge from months of silent treatment, pitched battles and crying jags with a marriage that is not only intact but stronger than it was before construction. Many architects use the parallel of pregnancy and birth to describe what their clients endure. “As in pregnancy, there are feelings of loss of control, some incredible high and lows,” says Ball, a parent himself. “Then, the minute it is over, you begin the process of healing and forgetting what you went through and marvel at the beauty of your creation.”
Some couples experience remodeling as a marital pep rally. They go through it exuding team spirit, singing a fight song and, in some rare cases, planning their next remake. These people are mainly rumored to exist. Architects can rarely name names.
Where they can be acutely specific is in talking about the divorces. One Venice architect witnessed the disintegration of the marriage and the subsequent blossoming of romance that brought more work. “I did one huge remodel and the couple broke up right after it was over,” says Watson. “I got two jobs out of it. I designed a new house for him and when she married again, I remodeled the original house again.”
The conflict starts before construction begins, often doing the most damage with couples who haven’t been married for very long or couples who have gingerly avoided talking about “sensitive issues” like long-time bad habits. This is the part that architect Nick Berman likens to “The Newlywed Game.” In theory it is the most pleasurable part of the process, when an architect asks a couple about the specifications of their dream house. “You end up answering questions no one, including your spouse, has ever asked you before,” says Berman. “It can be a lot of fun. Or it can be a nightmare of revelation. How do you use the bathroom? Do you like to share a closet? What is the first thing you like to see when you open your eyes in the morning?”
Ball once had clients who did so much bickering during this period, disagreeing on nearly every detail, that he wore a striped referee’s shirt to their meetings to lighten up the atmosphere a bit.
Joan Kron, author of “Home Psyche,” a book about the psychology of home decoration, says the initial process of dreaming up a dream house can be complicated by deeply personal emotional factors, especially for a generation of people with high expectations for themselves and their homes. “A house is shelter,” she says, “but it is also a statement. For people making an economic change in life, which is most of us, it is a problem deciding what statement to make.”
“The very rich know what is expected of them--they do what has always been done,” says Kron. “But for people who want to change their paths, who have done better than their parents and want to be different from them, there is a struggle to find new rules and there are no rules.”
Standards are set by magazines and rivals at work, by romantic self-images and a vague desire to be hip. Often, couples find they have dueling expectations and disparate self-images. What is worse, they can be at odds with the self-image they realize each might have been hiding from the other. Architect Van Martin-Rowe has each partner make a wish list, which they submit to him privately. Martin-Rowe works on compromises, based on costs and general principles that both partners agree upon, in advance of his meetings with the couple. Then he asks the pair to form a company for the remodel, complete with a charter of duties and division of responsibility. “It helps to design some concrete hierarchy,” says Martin-Rowe. “They know who is in charge of what and there is less daily bickering. And I outlaw intimidation, any eyebrow raising about the other’s ability to do their job.” Even then, however, “it can get real tense,” he says.
So intense, that a husband woke up one night to find his wife hitting him with a pillow and yelling “Why can’t you ever admit you’re wrong?”
The good news about “The Newlywed Game” is that it provides a rare, if expensive, opportunity to come to grips with habits that drove the couples crazy for maybe 10 or 15 years. “When I deal with it, architecturally,” says Ball, “it ceases to be an issue.” In one couple, the wife always read at night to the utter consternation of the husband. The architect put in separate, custom bed lights and personal switches that ended the problem. Separate closets or bathrooms are the ultimate answer for other couples.
Harder issues have to do with style. The husband likes a clean, super-modern look, the wife, country. Basically, the only way to satisfy both and maintain collective sanity is to dump the issue on the designer’s lap, if there’s money in the budget for an expert. Couples remodeling without an architect or a designer they can order around, blame or belittle are working without a net. “I’m a referee and a marriage counselor,” says Berman. “That’s my job. I smooth ruffled feathers.”
Kron, who recently remodeled her Manhattan apartment, hired an architect, even though, after years of writing about house design and decoration, she is considered an expert herself. “Often, men make women feel like they were born knowing how to decorate,” she says. “There is tremendous pressure to do it herself. It’s too much anxiety for either person while they are trying to trust their own taste and feeling so susceptible about the amount of money being spent.”
One Westside husband insisted his wife of 17 years do all the designing herself. She fought to hire an architect, but she never showed her husband the bills. As a working woman, she was able to pay him out of her own salary without tapping their joint account. “Deceit kept our marriage together,” she says.
Even couples who plot murder during the design phase generally declare a truce as the plan is finalized and construction begins. “In the beginning, it can be very exciting,” says Watson. “There is a lot of action. You can walk in every day and see something new.”
But this flush of good will usually lasts only through the demolition, foundation and framing. Then, the marital grind, the make-it-or-break-it months, ensue. “Everything seems to come to a screeching halt and just sits there as the painstaking and seemingly invisible wiring and plumbing are done,” says Watson. Then couples begin to realize that they have surrendered everything--privacy, flexibility, spontaneity and control--and they begin to forget why.
The discomfort begins to eat away at civility, good feelings and any vestiges of common courtesy. When shaving in the dining room, washing dishes in the shower and inadvertently flashing the electrician, the only way to relax is to attack. “It was the only time I threatened to kill my husband and really meant it,” remembers one veteran of a master suite and bathroom remodel. “Devising ways to do him in became the only successful distraction I had from the chaos.”
One woman, married less than a year before remodeling a kitchen, flipped out when the construction dragged on weeks beyond the original completion date. Sick of all the dirty dishes piling up on the stairs, she started yelling, “I’m tired, so tired of all this.”
“My husband yelled back he didn’t know I was such a princess when he married me,” she says. He grabbed the dishes off the stairs and stormed upstairs. “And there I found my husband on his knees doing the dishes in the tub. It was one of the worst times in my marriage,” she remembers.
“We survived,” she adds, “But it was so traumatic that, when he said last year that we could afford to do more, I said no. I’m not sure our marriage would survive.”
Says another woman, a survivor of kitchen and dining room remodel: “There were months when we were stuck in time, like an endless, uncomfortable camping trip only there was no place to go home to. They say nothing tests a marriage like having kids. Well, try adding that second bathroom. Normally we get along surprisingly well. But this, it took a lot out of us.”
Goldenberg suggests a honing of problem-solving techniques before undertaking a remodel. The worst trap, she says, is falling into a reflex of blame, assuming it is the other person’s responsibility when something goes wrong. The flares should go up as soon as a discussion of windows turns into a raging examination of past faults and disappointments. When, as the basement floods because the workmen screwed up the plumbing, the wife turns to her husband, who is hip deep in water, and demands to know why he is a failure in life, the damage is done. “They’ve got to step back and say, ‘What are we fighting about?’ ” says Goldenberg. “Is it the windows or the fact that you think this is too much money and it’s scaring you to death?” Ball, and most other architects, strongly recommend moving out of the house during a renovation. At an average of $15,000 for a typical renovation, it isn’t an option for everyone. But if you have to stay, says Berman, marital harmony pays off in the quality of work: “The workers feel it, I feel it, everybody feels it. If there is a lot of tension and fear, you lose a creative edge.”
Best to adopt the attitude of the family dog, who, according to Ball, thoroughly enjoys the instability and disarray of renovation. “Dogs love construction,” he says. “They revel in the activity, the piles of things--they speak the same language as the workers.”
Then again, their letdown comes later, as the humans blissfully unpack the dishes and hang pictures on pristine walls. “They’re depressed for months afterward,” reports Ball.
