Home Depot is an odd place for an epiphany. Especially if, like me, you do the most to avoid the place. But we live in a time and a culture that is increasingly asking us to do more for ourselves, so trips to the depot have become a necessity.
Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, doing things yourself or “DIY” felt like it meant something — especially if you were surrounded by a punk rock ethos. Whether is was making your own magazine with a copy machine and a stapler or jamming yourself into a dilapidated house with a hundred other people to see a band perform (and thinking nothing of fire safety), buying books from independent presses, or organizing through word-of-mouth and flyers.
Yes, this is over-simplistic and, most definitely, generalized, but DIY for a long while meant harnessing acquired knowledge into individual and collective power — giving the possibility to zig when the normies zagged. DIY promised anyone could go out and find Another Way to get shit done.
Now, though, Pinterest and HGTV has entered the chat and I have feelings.
I know people are out here believing the world is flat and vaccines implant microchips in brains, and our intestines are really made of Twizzlers, but none of us are immune from being gullible. Especially me. Pinterest saw my dumb ass coming and served me a project I had no business attempting.
My bathroom has always been one of the most boring spaces in my century-old house. The floor is adequate, the cabinet and vanity are cheap, and the tub, I believe, is a bath-fitter coverup, hiding something heinous and money trap-ish behind its stick-and-go walls.
It’s amazing how trusting I can be when presented with a rando on the Internet. I share blood with people I wouldn’t trust with 50 cents, but someone posting their project on Pinterest? Take all my trust, roll around in it, it’s yours now.
The pin offered a simple solution: my sink but better. And cheap! All I would need is some feather finish cement, sandpaper, paint for the cabinet, a new faucet, and time.
Looking back, the name of the cement brand — HENRY — should have been a red flag. If there was a Henry motto passed down through my father’s blood line it’s this: “If it barely works, it’s perfect.” I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to avoid this destiny.
The feather finish cement comes in a powder which has to be mixed, spread, and sanded over hours or days. What most DIY projects rarely mention is the time intensiveness of the task at hand — a massive oversight considering time is a finite resource. But nonetheless, I whole assed my way through each layer of cement and my husband installed the faucet. I use “install” very graciously here.
I enjoyed the sink for maybe two days. What followed was a slow disintegration of the cement and a surface that saw every scuff, strand of cat hair, and glob of toothpaste stick to its surface and embed itself like bubble gum outside a 7-11 parking lot.
Then, ringlets of scum began to form despite the tsunami of bleach I poured over my biggest regret. The black matte faucet, a cheap one before I knew about brands, started to develop hard water stains. Eventually, the sink became the visual equivalent of a Philadelphia sewer.
Over the course of the pandemic, the sink continued to deteriorate. It’s not like I could bring someone in to change it, and I was frozen in budgetary fear: Do I change the sink and keep the floor or save money and re-do the entire bathroom? And then, as most things do in my life, the sink became a metaphor.
We continued to live with the gross ass sink while I tried to figure out how to tackle the problem I created. Which is how I ended up in Home Depot staring at the faucets.
But they didn’t have the gold one I wanted. Brass, actually. A few weeks before, I’d gone ahead and bought a new cabinet on sale with matte black handles and faux bamboo-like wood. I was so close to ridding myself of my gargantuan eyesore, I was ready to grab anything in front of me and say, “this is the one.”
“I feel like you should get what you want,” my husband said. “Don’t just pick anything.”
So I didn’t.
I went home and found the one I wanted — an upside down Kohler brass hook with some kind of inner technology that makes for a nice, effortless stream. It’s coated in science so water stains shouldn’t be a thing. My fancy science faucet. Cool.
I called someone to install it. No YouTube videos were watched. No pins were saved. There was no consultation with a library book. My husband and I got out of the way.
This simple “call someone” has been many years in the making. It requires the money or credit to do so, the knowledge of a handy man service, their training and expertise acquired over years, and an availability of time. Plus, my home — with all its socioeconomic, racial, and political implications of access and household wealth.
I do not watch HGTV. I know it’s popular, but it’s never been my bag. The spaces are constructed more like sets for camera angles and the work is allegedly shoddy, causing, what homeowners say, is crippling lawsuits and debt. But mainly I never watch because it pisses me off too much.
What I find so unwatchable about HGTV and unsustainable about Pinterest is all of it leads with unrealistic budgets — whether it’s outlandish like it typically is with HGTV (pulls nose hairs for a living with a budget of $2MM) or insanely frugal like Pinterest (build a whole house with this Ikea shelf hack). Or the curveball Magnolia that insists color has never existed in the history of the world, so everything must be white, black, or navy. Possibly toad green, if you want to get dangerous. And it will cost at least three times as much.
Both Pinterest and HGTV have decoupled DIY from political action and placed it squarely within capitalism, making all of our lives worse in ways that seem frivolous on the surface, but encapsulate more than bathroom regret.
I want more for us than a DIY country that’s more sheriff’s sale than new construction. With our crummy DIY freelance jobs. Doing DIY home projects with our DIY GoFundMe health care. Arguing over our DIY facts. So our DIY public money can become privatized profit, and we’re left with a shittier country to fix on our own time.
Somewhere, along the way, we started saying “do it yourself” and forgot it means exactly what we think it means.
Currently
Reading: Riot Woman: Using Feminist Values to Destroy the Patriarchy
Watching: Rutherford Falls (Peacock)
Wearing: I can’t walk 2 ft without someone stopping me with compliments when I wear NooWorks dresses
Retweeting: I can’t stop thinking about Ivana’s grave (I’m gonna write about it this week for Black Girl In Maine)
Supporting artist: Girls on Tees
Share Flop Era with the kind of person who knows there are at least 10 books on her TBR right now, but that one mentioned in that thing she just read is talking to her.