How my bathroom reno taught me about imperfection, acceptance, and grace
This last weekend, my partner’s family came to visit us to help us rip out our old, moldy shower and replace it with a new surround.
We bought our house in summer 2021. The market here in Asheville was cah-razy at that time and the house that was in our budget was bound to be a fixer upper. We found one that had “good bones” and mostly just needed cosmetic work (to be fair, a lot of cosmetic work). We decided we could get down with a house full of paneling because it had the rest of the things we were looking for (mainly a yard for our dogs and a place for me to garden), plus getting out of an apartment sounded pretty fucking exciting.
We’ve done some light work to our house (painting, mostly), but this shower project was the first time we had done any significant demo to our house. My father in law came prepared with all the tools, and we got to work. Demo was easy (and fun! So cathartic) and before long the mold was gone and we were down to the studs. My father in law and I started setting things up to put the new shower surround in. The surround needed wood supports in specific places, so I let him do all the measuring and cutting, and I helped screw things in. That part was decently easy. Then we started trying to actually put things back together. The fit with the shower panels was pretty snug, but it did fit before we busted out the adhesive to put on the back of the panels to actually attach everything together. But once one panel was in and secure, the other 2 didn’t fit the way we had originally planned. It was off by maybe ½”, which doesn’t sound like much but when the margin of error is less than ¼”, it was kind of a problem.
My father in law, partner and I had a pow wow in the bathroom to decide what to do. In my mind, the options were 1. Rip everything out and start from scratch; 2. Find a way to make this current (and imperfect) scenario work. There were limitations to option 1. If we did that, there was still no guarantee that it would be “perfect” in the way that I so wish it could be, and it would cost money, time, and materials to attempt to make it so. My partner’s family was only visiting for the weekend, and we desperately needed the help and tools to get this project done. I sat and considered for a few minutes before I decided to go with option 2. Option 2 had its downsides as well, but the primary downside was imperfection, which was more of an annoyance than an actual hindrance, so I chose that one.
Here’s what happened: We installed an imperfect shower. The immediate impact of that is that we had a working shower the next day (yay!). The consequence of that was that the back corner of my shower was now not square, which meant that installing the drywall around my shower would now be a glorious pain in the ass. A couple days later, when my partner and I attempted to hang the drywall around our shower, I started to realize how my choice to have an imperfect (but functional) shower was going to force me to get acquainted with my shit around perfection, and that I was going to have to get creative to find a solution. My partner and I decided to take a break from drywall installation for the night so we could come up with a workable solution.
The next day, I went to Lowe’s knowing I would at a minimum need many shims, and maybe an act of God to help me figure out how to get the drywall to fit in the corner. After about 40 minutes (and an entire pack of shims later), the drywall was in the corner. I would have to use some joint compound to smooth over my imperfections, but I thought it was good enough to call it “done.”
The rest of the project (just replacing old drywall on the wall between our toilet and shower) was easy, because it was pretty square/level, and I hung that quickly.
This project brought up a few lessons that I wanted to share:
Life isn’t perfect. Ever.
If you don’t know this about me, I am a bit of a perfectionist. I enjoy a routine, I like things to be a certain way, and as much as it drives me crazy, that’s just not realistic. The shower wasn’t perfect, my drywall job wasn’t perfect, and life isn’t fucking perfect. Hardly anything ever works out the way we’d like it to. Our work in this lifetime isn’t to strive for perfection so much as it is to be present with what is in front of us. And what is present is a whole hell of a lot of imperfections. As soon as I was able to accept that the shower wasn’t going to be perfect, and that a functional shower was more important than a perfect shower, we were able to move forward. But if I had chosen to ruminate on wanting perfection, it would have delayed the whole project and potentially caused conflict with my partner and his family.
Accepting imperfection is what life asks of us. It asks if there is a greater good to be gained from allowing imperfection to be present instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist. Striving for perfection can cause delays, setbacks, challenges in relationships (ask me how I know about this one), and potentially getting “stuck” in a situation or mindset where we don’t see any way forward. Seeking perfection can actually prevent us from having the things we want.
Acceptance is the answer.
I talk a lot about acceptance with my clients in recovery, but acceptance is required in life regardless of whether you are in recovery or not. Acceptance is so dang hard. It forces us to look at what is right in front of us. To let go of any glamorous ideals, to take off our preconceived notions of how things should be, and sit with what is directly in front of us. Our culture in America is very focused on smoothing over uncomfortable truths. It happens every day–in politics, in business, in family life. Politicians dance around questions and rarely give straight answers, business leaders warp and twist financial reports to say what they want them to say, and we pretend that having kids and a full time job is easy, and there’s something wrong with you if you have a hard time with that. But the reality is that all of the “truths” associated with those statements are yucky. It’s not fun to think about those things, so we craft a more comfortable truth that we can live with. This often doesn’t serve us and it conditions our brains to discard reality in favor of more comfortable alternatives (ever wonder how people get so sucked into video games, social media, and binge watching tv?). The solution, as hard as it is, is to be present and acknowledge what is true, even if we don’t want to.
Grace is required.
When we are working with situations that are challenging our ideas about how things should be, we’re going to get frustrated. If you’re not frustrated (or having another uncomfortable feeling), then I’m concerned. This shit is HARD. Hence why having some grace, empathy, and compassion for yourself and for others around you is so so necessary.
When my partner and I were cutting a piece of drywall to go above our shower, he broke a pretty big piece almost right in half. We only had 2 sheets of drywall and we needed almost all of it to get the project done. My immediate reaction was murderous rage (totally kidding, but I was pretty upset). I sat with it for a minute, took some deep breaths, and came to this conclusion: We are both learning here. We are learning. We are just 2 normal people; we don’t have much home improvement experience, but we have a lot of willingness to learn. So we are bound to make mistakes. Turns out, we had almost exactly enough (even with the broken piece), so there was no need to get so upset.
When doing the plumbing, I put together the hot water side and my father in law put together the cold water side. When we turned the water back on, the cold side was leaking. We turned the water back off and investigated the issue.
I could have gotten upset (and I could feel myself right on the edge of being exasperated that we found another roadblock), but chose to just wait it out and see what happened. The desire for perfection was so great, it could have caused me to get upset at my father in law, instead of focusing on what was important–finding a solution. He had forgotten to put glue on the fitting (easy fix!). We ended up finding the solution together, instead of pitting one against the other.
Being willing to have some grace and compassion can help challenging circumstances go a lot smoother, and help you avoid unnecessary conflict with people you love. Life is already hard; we don’t need to make it any harder.
I hope you found this helpful. I’d love to hear from you if this resonates with you.
Until next time,
Amanda
