Buying your first home solo you operate from a place of trial by error. When the smoke has cleared, you enter a short phase of triumph. A home buying win. You are a champion in your living room corner. A friend once told me, you’ll know you are finally settled in when you stop going to Home Depot every week. I thought I was at that stage. I hadn’t needed a toilet part, brass bracket or wood of any kind in a month. I felt like I had met the basic requirements of functionality and safety in the home, could it possibly be coast time for a while? The roof had about five more years on it before I would need to do repair, and the foundation needed work but I wouldn’t be floating down a lazy river from a hard rain anytime soon. I moved into the fantasy phase of home ownership where you start to think about remodels you have no desire or energy to pull the trigger on. The dilapidated garage that will one day be a studio, and the wall in the kitchen that could be taken down for a more open floor plan.
Then ten months into home ownership, we still had paper blinds on all the main windows. I had promised myself I would hire someone to install nice blinds when I could afford it. I would not do blind installation myself. I made a financial commitment to myself to treat the main room of the house with blinds that glided up and down and were made of that nice soft accordion cloth. Then a few expenses came up and I got scared. I fell back into that mentality of, maybe I could just do the blinds for $125 versus the $800 it would cost a service. Gone was the knowing how awful installing blinds are. I convinced myself that conquering the blinds would prove I can be a single woman with a house and do this without a man. I could also do this without installers apparently which note to future self has nothing to do with a man and the word “installer” should be forever synonymous with “savior.”
The plan started impulsively which always ends tragically. I was at Home Depot with my eleven-year-old getting metal mesh to try and keep the stray cats from coming through the open slates on the front gates (laughing now at that naivety), and I saw how inexpensive blinds were and if you measure, they will cut them for you. I was fired up. I ran home and measured all the window frames (with a slightly floppy metal measuring tape so accuracy already a low batting average). As it was, I had spent every day irked by the paper blinds because I didn’t follow the instructions and put them on the outer frame not the inner so they looked like, well someone who doesn’t read the directions before installing. So, I was way past due to rip them down, and in optimism that I would be able to put up my newly cut set of metal blinds (yup, caved on that vision too), I tore them all off.
I ran back to Home Depot (so we are now on trip two) and picked out the crappy metal blinds and got them cut. Since this great ambitious idea came to me at the late hour of 4:30 in the afternoon, I was already tired. I returned home and started on the first blind. My measurements were completely off. How had the window frame shrunk? I went back to Home Depot (trip #3) and had the blinds re-sized. Now I was back and as I was kneeling on my kids’s Ikea desk, I was acutely aware of how quickly my knees started to throb as I attempted to balance the blind, a drill and a nail which of course all came tumbling down on my head. I was showing visible signs of perspiration and slightly messy hysteria was building up from deep in my gut. I can do this I thought. I got this. I made this plan. I was starting to already regret tearing down the paper blinds, especially in my daughter’s room where the people next door had a light in their bathroom that would go on and off all night. She would never be able to sleep if I didn’t make these blinds happen. I finally got three of the plastic clips up that hold the blind and I did what the instructions said…. I lined up the blind and waited for the easy CLICK. There was no click. In fact, the guy on the You Tube video behind me kept saying over and over. “It’s so easy, you just go click.” But then he said, “Make sure you don’t put the brackets in such and such way…” and sure enough I had made that very mistake. I had to take the plastic pieces down (all held in place by three mini screws) and start again. As I held my arms up high while kneeling on the desk, my muscles couldn’t take it and started shaking. Had I lost this much muscle mass in my 50s? I couldn’t believe it.
That was when I started swearing like a sailor and with a great roar like a bear who has been shot with a tranquilizer gun, I ripped the blind off the brackets and flung it with great release, relief, and abandonment of all assemblance of mature order across my daughter’s room. She poked her head in to see the commotion, and her eyes went from me fists clenched still kneeling on the desk to the slightly bent, crumpled blind in the corner of her room.
“Um, how’s it going, mom?” she said.
With a low-level satanic growl, I said “Go outside now because I am about to say words not age appropriate for your young ears…”.
“But…”
“Go!” I screamed and I think some green bile came out on a stream of fire because she fled and when I knew she and her sister were outside I dropped every F bomb I could as I stuffed all the blinds back in the box, tears staining the cardboard and made my way back to Home Depot (trip #4). I made the kids come in the car with me for moral support only to realize when I got there, that I had forgotten my wallet. That was a very silent drive back to drop them off (they really didn’t need to be there – I should suffer alone) and get my wallet and the miracle is, they took the decimated cut blinds back (trip #5). I thanked God silently for this gift. I bought new paper blinds and came home and applied them properly this time inside the window. So that was one win.
I now had no idea what to do and resigned myself to having temporary paper blinds forever. I had tried to cut corners on the promise to myself to have nice blinds installed and I was sitting in a tattered decimated heap of confusion?
If you can believe it, two weeks later when I was back in Home Depot, I saw the blinds AGAIN (still trying to save pricey installation fees) and had a moment, where I thought, maybe try again, Kim. In the stillness of no struggle of repair or costs, I sought chaos. Projects like the blinds pointed to a flaw in my personality; the rawness of sitting in spaces of time when I am not “doing something.” I had gone a good two weeks where I wasn’t outrunning a pending problem. Nothing had presented itself so here I was, ready to take on that battle again. I had selective memory of the nightmare, and my angst. Somewhere deep inside me still believed that chaos and pain was living and required to “get shit done” as a single woman.
Now God stepped in (because he can only take me being a dumb ass in the same area for so long) to show me a sign on the wall that read, “We install your blinds for $100.” God needed signage for me at that point since I have such a strong will to do it myself and save a buck (which is ironic because I would never do Botox myself and I spend thousands on that without a question…) I was seated before a highly efficient Home Depot blind rep in a hot minute and signed up for the installation (reveling in my favorite new word “installer”). And naturally, going with what I had to learn about patience, the process of Home Depot installing the blinds was not fast. No, the installer had to come to the house and first measure (with a non-bending measurement stick), and then send those measurements to the Home Depot computer system and I had to go back and get the blinds cut, and then the installer had to come back and clip them in. But here is the best part. Everything worked. Every measurement was right and the blinds went CLIP in about five minutes for install guy. I had no culpability for any part of it, and I even only spent $400 all in. It took ten visits to Home Depot to make the blinds an easy install from me, after originally proclaiming I would never do it myself. They could have been up in three but we are here on this earth to learn. Wherever your trajectory is necessary, you will find yourself back and forth as many times as it takes to surrender.