Home repairs can make or break relationships

The first household repair my wife and I did together almost wrecked our relationship.

This was early days of cohabitation, the two of us in a ramshackle apartment I’d shared with buddies before she moved in. Slowly but surely, she was moving us away from the freestuff-at-the-side-of-road decorating motif I favoured to a more civilized, less rodent-forward style of living.

The bathroom upgrade was modest — a shower curtain around an old but serviceable claw-foot bathtub — but it did require some power tools and a set of improvisational fix-it skills I had not yet acquired. Patience, something that still eludes me on a regular basis, also would have helped.

Without those key elements in place and our relationship still relatively new, things devolved from my passive-aggressive sighing, to her clipped, instructive tone of voice — ‘Why don’t you do it this way?’ — to a full-on screaming match. It was probably our first good donnybrook and it’s likely still in the top five (which is really a testament to how well the intervening 20-plus years have gone.)

We talked it out afterwards and came to the somewhat stunning realization that we weren’t really fighting about the stupid shower curtain but instead playing out our relationship dynamics — power and control — via home improvement. When we both stopped trying to win, things went much better (and not just when trying to do stuff around the house, either.)

We recently celebrated our 23rd wedding anniversary and spent a good part of it working on fixing our back fence. That probably doesn’t sound romantic but knocking off things the never-ending list of household chores makes us both feel good and there’s no law that says spending time together in a fancy restaurant is any more enjoyable than spending it wandering the aisles of a local home improvement store.

Like the bathroom fix so many years before, this job required a little bit of both skill and improvisation. We’ve both developed a decent set of handyperson chops over the years, as well as a keen understanding of what we can reasonably accomplish versus what we should pay a professional to do. This job was right on the line, a sort of let’ssee-how-this-goes affair.

Which also means it had the potential to create marital strife. After our initial epiphany, we’ve learned to work together in something resembling harmony but, like us, it’s imperfect. We still have our moments, no matter how well intentioned we are.

But this repair went surprisingly well. My initial plan was a disaster and we abandoned it early for her more practical suggestion. We shared both the heavy lifting, the use of power tools and, critically, realized when it was time to stop and drink wine and order takeout — it was our anniversary after all.

We finished up the next morning, a little fuzzy-headed but proud of what we had accomplished — both with the fence and in our marriage.