Decorating as Ecology

Decorating as Ecology

As I stood (laboured) at the side of my suburban tutor house slowly, very slowly, spreading top-soil over the lattice landscaping bricks embedded into the clay soil I began to ponder how yet another simple job had escalated to major proportions. The reality is, there is no such thing as a simple home improvement job. Everything may have the illusion of simplicity and start out with baby steps, but in fact and in short order, there is a complex interrelationship with numerous interactions between work done at point A and its subsequent and inevitable impact on point B, and C and so on.

In the Mennonite world in which I grew up things were plain and simple. Decorating was done in variations of floral prints, clothing was in black, no one really decorated and landscaping was really a subversive behavior. As an adult I found myself ill-prepared for the secular world. Things moved too fast and change was a threat.

My father, as titular head of the household made all of the decorating decisions, my mother never had a say in any of these issues. My father had no sense of colour, or design. His choices were either arbitrary, or based on the least cost criteria. He once brought home a green and a red chair for the same room to go with the burgundy curtains, the floral rug, and the beige walls, which I would later wallpaper. I felt sorry for my mom and more sorry for myself as became involved in the bizarre world of renovation.

Think of one of those numerous home renovations shows in which say a single mom is trying to send her son through college and buys a fixer upper in the hopes of renovating and flipping the house on the market within three months and then walking away with a 100 thousand dollar profit, after certain state and local taxes, lawyers fees, sales commissions, and answering a skill testing question without the use of a calculator. I saw such an episode in which a capable woman did just that, fix and flip a house. Her son is now likely a grad from some Ivy League university in the East because she understood the simple principles that I will eventually outline somewhere in this essay.

Consider the modest Golden Toad found in Central America. It lives in small ponds on the mossy mountain sides of Costa Rica a mile above sea level. This humble toad, lived in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve and it depended on mist forming at certain elevations thereby allowing it to survive within narrow limits of temperature and humidity. However, because of global warming and the burning of fossil fuels in distant lands the mist no longer forms on those idyllic mountain sides and 30 of the 50 species vanished. It follows that renovations, decorating and landscaping are like the ecology of the Golden Toad, everything is connected.

While moving the heavy wet soil in my yard I had the opportunity and motive to make some sense of the ecologic intricacies of interior and exterior home improvement. In my mental journey I started with the realization that as a mere man, suffering from decorating dyslexia, I had little hope in truly understanding the broad scope or big picture of what lay before me. It’s like summarizing quantum physics in 25 words or less. It can be done, but who would want to?

Having simple standards and personal needs I don’t really know or care if a certain wallpaper matches, or even if my tie matches my shirt for that matter. I recall while living at home, at age 25, and not paying a penny for rent, I felt that I should make myself useful. My parents had the same décor in the house since the Depression Era and I thought (where that thought came from I will never know. I must have been high) I would wallpaper the living room and kitchen. They gave me a modest budget and no direction and away I went. Later I would grow to realize that wallpapering is likely the biggest single cause of divorce, fortunately, I was still single and living at home that these subtleties did not register.

I think it was probably years later when I brought a girl friend home who I eventually married and then divorced primarily over wallpaper issues. Her narcissistic demeanour, cruelty to animals, (including myself), borderline personality and constant infidelity were all forgivable to a point, but not the ordeal of wallpapering together. It was she who pointed out that none of the patterns in my kitchen wallpaper job matched.

I had chosen a detailed ivy pattern but failed to realize, at the time of installation, that the pattern formed by the trails of ivy from one sheet should somehow merge, meld, blend or at least meet the corresponding pattern on the adjoining panel of wallpaper. I guess I didn’t really do that. In my rendition a single length of ivy stopped at the seam and a new one, which should have linked with its abandoned mate was left alone just six inches below on the next strip of wallpaper. My pattern of not matching spread throughout the kitchen. Fortunately, the dining room was done in vertical stripes and matching wasn’t an issue. I never brought another girl friend to my parent’s house.

I was happy in my ignorance concerning the wallpaper mismatch and even when it was pointed out, my parents and I didn’t much care. It didn’t become an issue until my mom tried to sell the house about a decade later, but by then I was safely out of the province. Clearly, I have no appreciation for the bigger coordinated scheme of world order. In order to simplify the complexities I began to develop a series of theorems which I thought would better prepare me for the cruel world and narrow the gap between myself and the woman I married in an earlier paragraph.

Theorem #1: There is no such thing as a simple decorating/renovating/landscaping idea.

Corollary #1: All things within a decorating system are interconnected and by adjusting one part of the system all the sub-parts of the system are also affected in often unpredictable and detrimental ways.

Corollary #2: Men don’t get any of this until it is way too late.

For example, my (ex) wife decided that we (read I) should install a new vanity in our main floor washroom, a simple concept. The vanity chosen was not from the Sears catalogue, Canadian Tire or any easily accessible source know to man. The vanity actually turned out to be an antique mahogany dresser. It took us three months to locate the ideal piece in an antique shop some 450 km to the south. It was brought north with great effort and expense. It was explained to me in short sentences, with some degree of patience that since the dresser/vanity sits on legs and not flat on the floor like any conventional vanity, the unfinished portion of our bathroom floor (once covered by the former vanity) would be exposed and we would therefore have to resurface that portion of the floor. Do you see where this is going?

The new floor would have to match the existing tile floor in the adjoining hallway just outside the washroom.

With this revelation my body tensed and my lower lip did this rapid twitching thing as I envisioned the decorating neuron connectors within the left hemisphere of my (ex) wife’s brain firing in quick succession. The spatial implications of a decorating idea in one area and its subsequent diffusion to other areas of the house were most likely appearing to her as if in a vision. She was truly having a spiritual moment. I was in hell.

Like all moments, this too passed. My spousal-unit proposed that if we have to redo the bathroom floor anyway after the vanity/dresser was installed, and given that the new floor should match the hallway; then why not replace all of the ceramic tiles with hardwood floors. The twitching in my lip increased in frequency and I could now detect distinct heart palpations as she easily made the leap to hardwood flooring. “After all,” she went on, the tiles are cracking in places, the grouting is poorly done and the tacky beige colour is really no colour at all.” This statement was very offensive to me as beige just happens to be my favourite colour.

The hardwood flooring, it was decided, should extend all the way to the main entrance hall and if we go that far, she conjectured, it would save money, in the long run, if we extended it right through into the formal dining room. My mind was totally boggled, warning flags were flying to a backdrop of fireworks. My lips were numb from twitching. How, I wondered could installing 700 square feet of expensive hardwood flooring save us money if we didn’t have to do it in the first place? I had actually liked the old vanity and was saddened and confused as to how replacing the vanity had led to putting cherry wood floors in a distant dining room.

I believe it was about this time, I now refer to it as the “Vanity Era,” that I began to expand on my decorating theorems. I suppose it was a coping mechanism which allowed me to come to grips with my changing world order. In my quest for understanding I came to the realization that decorating is really just a frivolous extension of ecology in the natural world. I soon found out that by grounding decorating theorems in reality everything became more focused. It was like coming out of the sea mist and seeing the sun. It’s a blinding and illuminating experience. All natural systems are interconnected in ways that we often can not predict or even understand, just like decorating! Flashback to the poor little Golden Toad.

Armed with my new insights I developed my second theorem.

Theorem #2: There are complex interactions between subsets within a given decorating system and these may be interior or exterior to the house.

That is to say I quickly discovered that exterior design or landscaping was governed by the same set of decorating principles which apply to the inside of the house. There were no safe havens or neutral territory. Further, all things are interconnected. I felt I was growing as a person.

One cool summer evening my wife and I took a leisurely stroll around our yard. “Wouldn’t it be a good idea,” she began, (well hold the phone right there, my chest tightened and my breath came in short gasps), “to construct an inlayed brick walkway between the end of the deck and the rear gate at the back of the yard. “After all,” she observed, “The kids and the dogs have already worn a path between these two points, all that’s left to do is formalize the route.” To her way of thinking this proposal probably seemed like such a logical next step.

Inwardly, I thought, logical, like an addict going from cocaine to crack. Outwardly, I smiled all the while thinking of my first theorem (quickly flip back to review this theorem). Outwardly, beads of sweat appeared on my forehead and my knees felt somewhat rubbery. I quickly agreed to the idea and that’s why you met me with a shovel back in paragraph one. Idiot!

The brief pause between the time of my agreement to this new decorating scheme, to the point when my wife suggested that the walkway would look more aesthetically pleasing if it pursued a more curvilinear form, could likely be measured in nano-seconds. She elaborated by suggesting that the walkway would enhance the natural beauty of the yard if it took on a more circular appearance by linking. not only the rear gate but the front gate as well. Thereby, creating the potential to make an English style garden within the area bounded by the new brick walkway. Following that we could extend the deck and build a brick patio from the deck to merge with the walkway. Wooden fan backed chairs with some white rattan furniture would make excellent accent pieces and make for a lovely sitting area providing we built a small water feature with a fountain, perhaps a small waterfalls, if we brought in the larger style landscaping rocks.

The following summer, while sitting in the backyard on a newly painted fan backed chair, I took a few moments to reflect on the numerous decorating, renovations and landscaping jobs that I had completed in the two years since moving into our home. A home, by the way, that I naively thought was complete in every way when I first bought it. I must admit that my understanding of decorating and change in the home environment is growing, yet I can’t help but feel that I may never see the “Big Picture.” Alas, I am a man and I am inadequate to the challenge. However, I do believe my theorems have brought me some small measure of personal solace and brief glimpses of insight.

As I walk across our hardwood floors, or gaze at the fully renovated kitchen, dining room, front foyer, bedrooms, recreational room, breakfast nook, attic and garage the genesis of my last theorem begins to take shape.

Theorem #3: Agreement to any small decorating project commits one to a major project.

Corollary#1: Decorating costs progress in geometric proportions, like concentric rings in a backyard pond.