addicted to DIY?

5 Dec 2011
Can you be addicted to "jobs around the house"? For the last three years I have worked nearly every day on this house as employment - as if I were being paid for it. Until a year ago I was in a sense being paid for it by accumulating a larger share of the eventual sale value of the property. Since we moved the shares have stayed the same but I still work with the same intensity.
Now in the run up to Christmas the intensity has increased to the extent that I find it difficult to think of anything else I want to do. What has happened to my resolve to write more, to get more engaged with creative things which are not sound dependent? When, finally, the list of jobs still to be done is down to the really finicky - that little bit in the top corner which only I can see - will I have forgotten how to relax?
Perhaps not, because even though my immediate motivation is still obsessive, now that I am down to the last few details in the kitchen I can feel a real sense of achievement- a glow of satisfaction every time I look at the room with different lighting or from a different angle.
The traditional Christmas deadline is different this year because for the first time in may years we are hosting a gathering of a key selection of my ruptured family overlapping with part of Thelma's. Since Jan, my ex-wife, invited us for Christmas two years ago, this is now the return match and she is coming together with Hannah, Megan and  Charlie. Hannah has just had a dramatic falling out with her current partner but her ex Danny will be arriving on Boxing day at around the same time as Matt and Carol.
Viv and Nina are coming for New Year.
I have to admit it is really important to me to have Jan's approval of what I have done here. Thelma has had a very large say in what went into this house, and her values have had a big effect on how I think about things in general, but the driving aesthetic behind my designs is still the one I developed, with Jan, in my thirties. The influence of Barry and Maggie Thompson and Vic Chinnery is still strong. We all shared a love for the simple interiors found in early American homes which were copied from Dutch and English rural styles. If, like many of the Dutch merchants, you were wealthy, your protestant ethic did not permit you to flaunt it. A well-ordered simple life was the benchmark, but you showed your closeness to the Lord by careful craftsmanship and attention to detail.
Fortunaltely Thelma, perhaps because of her protestant faith, also feels the strength of this view of the world as was evident when we recently spent half a day at the "Vermeer's Women" exhibition in Cambridge.