UPFRONT:HOME IMPROVEMENTS: readers, do not be taken in by the jaunty promise in this most double-crossing of phrases. Somewhere between the domestic bliss of the first word and the upbeat optimism of the second lies a world of pain.
It’s not that I’m denying there’s room for improvement in my own particular home: small pieces of it flake off at the touch, roof slates hurl themselves at passers-by, and every time I attempt to swing a cat, I chip off some vital element, the replacement of which costs more than all my worldly goods would fetch on Ebay.
Yet I would rather let our Stoneybatter demesne crumble about me like castles do around faded aristocrats than ever lift a finger to arrest its steady deterioration. This is in part because the prospect of interacting with fast-talking tradesmen is even more fearsome than that of living in a pile of rubble; and any action taken to improve one’s home seems somehow to begin with a substantial cash outlay, and end with the same pile of rubble anyway. Why accelerate the process? But the Beyoncé is American, where home improvements are a national pastime. He is not, therefore, a man to sit and patiently watch paint peel when he could wrench it off himself with one of the several enormous, unwieldy and, I am told, highly necessary tools at his disposal. Sigh. It is the American can-do approach that would drive any self-respecting slob to the gin bottle.
So when a tile fell from the bathroom wall during my morning ablutions, I did all I could to cover up the evidence. But no amount of Blu Tack was going to keep that mangy tile on the wall once it had made its bid for freedom. It was only a matter of time before the Beyoncé found out, emerging gleefully from the bathroom with tile in hand, like a 19th-century prospector carrying a solid gold nugget in his fist.
“The bathroom,” he declares with alarming excitement, “must be renovated forthwith.” I am forced to concede: the fungus that has emerged gamely from behind said tile is at such an advanced stage of development, it could easily have sat the Leaving Cert.
Out comes the toolbox, the toolbelt, and every single tool that has ever been invented – I’m talking all the way back to the flint axe – all to be strewn about the living-room floor for an unspecified duration while the job gets done.
Except it is not just one job, alas. Oh-ho-ho no. One fallen tile is just the tip of the iceberg, I am assured, and soon all its fellow tiles are brought down with that first defector, and an alarming chain of events ensues that is impossible to follow when articulated by a frenzied American on a home-improvement buzz. As far as I can make out, the jist seems to be that for that one tile to be replaced, the entire house has to be rebuilt.
Which means, oh joy of joys, a trip to the hardware shop. For the Beyoncé, the benefits of such an outing are manifold: not only will it offer him numerous solutions to our current bathroom predicament, it will also unleash all manner of ideas for fixing things that haven’t even broken yet.
From my own perspective, the experience of trailing behind his bouncing figure after several days of a non-functioning shower and the daily thud whackery of a bathroom being beaten to within an inch of its life makes a Brazilian bikini wax appear positively relaxing.
Thankfully, all that is required of me on this particular hardware trip is to keep track of the ping-ponging Beyoncé and to formulate an opinion on paint colour. The latter is harder than you might think. Choosing a colour for an entire bathroom wall from a series of rectangular blobs on a strip of cardboard is no mean feat, not helped by such elucidating colour names as Lunch Date and Ambient Sound. I’m not even exaggerating: both of these are names of actual colours. What colour, do you think, might a Lunch Date be, and are we factoring in dessert? I couldn’t tell you myself because when one examines paint swatches for more than five minutes at a time, they all start to blend together like plasticine.
What is the difference between Amber Queen 3 and Amber Queen 4? Why does Vermot appear to so closely resemble Avant Garde? Why not give them both the obvious moniker of Mucky Beige and call it a day? And who can explain how one small square of pleasant green hue will turn a whole wall into the colour of vomit? After long hours trying to tell the difference between one green blob and another, I sit on a tin of paint and weep for my lost tile. Even the Beyoncé has lost the will to live, having finally accepted that the reason why Irish people lived so long in small, unlit, windowless cottages is because embarking on home improvements on this blasted isle is the local equivalent of waterboarding.
I will admit, however, that when the bathroom is finished, light years later, it is indeed an improvement. The malignant fungus is gone forever, replaced by sparkling new tiles and a fresh paint job in an undefinable green colour that looked like a spring forest on the little rectangle on the swatch. Now that it has been plastered all over the walls, however, it seems a slightly more sinister hue. Malignant Fungus, some might call it. Perhaps we should have left it at Lunch Date.