The Marriage Files

Exploratory holes will be familiar to the wife of any inveterate remodeler. They’re the do-it-yourselfer’s equivalent of a wildcat oil well. The idea seems innocuous enough at first. “I’m just going to cut away a tiny piece of the drywall, hon, so I can see how the wiring’s run,” he’ll say. The idea is that the project at hand will require demolition of the drywall eventually anyway, so what’s the harm in making a preliminary incision now? The problem, as it turns out, is that what’s behind the hole invariably dictates a complete revision of the project so that it no longer involves the destruction of the drywall, but somehow your husband will never get around to suturing up the opening. The exploratory hole sits there, gaping at you, like a patient forgotten on the operating table while the doctors take a long lunch…in Bermuda. After a few years of this kind of household surgery, your home can look like a piece of Swiss cheese.

Our house is a showcase for exploratory holes. The first (and longest lasting) was the one high up in a wall right at the top of the stairs leading to the top floor. It was in plain view to anyone entering the front door and made even more visible by my husband K—‘s elegant disguise—a midnight-blue hand towel duct-taped to the wall to keep the heat from escaping into the airspace behind it. After three years, it had gotten so I didn’t even see the towel any more. When people came to the house for the first time, they’d ask about the towel and I’d say, “What towel?” in genuine confusion.

Recently, though, that exploratory hole was transfigured into a lovely trimmed access door to an attic storage space. By me, not K—. He just cuts the holes. I patch, spackle, frame, trim and/or stuff them.

To be completely fair, K— didn’t get off scot-free. He had to install the fan in the ceiling of the bathroom behind the hole. “Exploring” the possibilities for a bathroom fan was the purpose of cutting the hole in the first place. My only real gripe is that once the hole was cut, it took K— more time than it would to gestate four babies to actually get the job done.

As I type, I can see two more exploratory holes. They were cut when K— wanted to install track lighting in his office. Now, I’m not an electrician, but it seems to me that there has to be a way to install track lighting without making the walls look like the victim of a switchblade attack. After all, the whole point of track lighting is that it’s cheap and easy. If every track lighting installation also required the services of a drywall installer, a taper, and a painter, then you might as well just go for the expensive skylight.

The purpose of these particular holes is a mystery to me, as is the reason why they’re still there several years after the track lighting went in. Pretty soon people will be asking me about these holes and I’ll be saying “What holes?”

The crux of what bothers me about abandoned exploratory holes is that I like to finish a project once I’ve started it, while K— has no problem forsaking a job at the 90% (or 70% or 10%) completion stage if something else new and more interesting beckons. That’s why the nagging presence of the voids in his office wall didn’t, well, nag at him when he got the idea to remodel the basement. Now here was an undertaking with near-infinite wall prospecting potential! Forgotten were the office orifices.

To understand my chagrin at what happened next, you must know that the one thing—the only thing—this basement room had going for it is that it was drywalled. There wasn’t even a floor, but I could console myself that it had walls, so there was at least one thing we wouldn’t have to do. At first, K— assured me that only a little bit of drywall would have to come down in order for the remodel to go forward. A few months later, there was a rented 8-yard trash container in our driveway to contain all the drywall scrap, but that wasn’t the end of it. The devastation progressed in little bits, like a degenerative disease, and eventually not only was the basement room completely stripped of drywall, but so was the adjacent stairwell and part of the garage. It was all I could do to contain the destruction to one floor of the house.

Watching K—‘s exploratory holes in the basement become yawning cavities, I began to ask myself: do men have some strange penchant for dissection? Now there’s a scary thought to contemplate! Our plumber, carpenter, mechanic, accountant and my internist are all male. Just what are they all longing to dismember, I started to wonder?

I paid the price for letting my thoughts run off on that tangent, because during the phase of our basement remodel when K— was coming to me weekly to announce that more demolition was necessary, I started having a recurring nightmare. In it, I was sitting on my doctor’s examining-room table, wearing one of those nasty dressing gowns, waiting for him to start the exam. He entered the room with a sober expression on his face. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” he said, “but you’re going to need some exploratory holes.” At this, I’d catch my reflection in a mirror and see that I was a patchwork of comically bandaged wounds. “What, more?” I’d always groan in exasperation.

Often, in marriage, a wife has to take comfort where she can find it. I suppose there is a bright side to exploratory holes. They do usually end up becoming something better than what was there before, even if that metamorphosis can take an awfully long time. Our poor, denuded basement will one day look better than ever before. It has to: there’s nothing left for my husband to tear out! Except the slab, and…hey, is that the sound of a jackhammer?

TMF is a collective, ongoing work that is protected by relevant copyrights and registrations. You are invited to share the URL of this website for non-profit entertainment purposes, but in no other way can The Marriage Files (TMF) be used, reproduced, copied, developed, adapted, altered, or distributed without the express written permission of the author.