Home Improvement and Temperment

A good friend of mine was recently replacing the tiles in this kitchen floor and made an interesting observation about the psychology of home improvement.  He noticed that he saw three distinct responses to the various challenges the project produced.

There was his wife, the optimist.  She looked at the project and it seemed fairly straight-forward: tear out the old times, put in the new ones; this should be easy.  She had never done anything like this before but the instructions in the tiling book looked made it look easy. She figured that they could get the tiling project done ahead of the five days they planned on.  When the glue for the tiles didn't hold and one whole day of labor had to be redone, she got somewhat frustrated and discouraged by the whole process.  At that point, she was not excited about having new tiles in kitchen and probably wished they hadn't started the project.  Emotionally, she was not expecting the project to ever get done.

Then there was my friend, the pessimist (at least when it comes to home improvement).  He is not the handy-man type, had also not done anything like this before and assumed that the project would be a minor form of hell.   Nothing would work right, it was unrealistic to try to get it done in one week (but they didn't really have any choice in the matter), and the whole experience would be painful.  When things didn't go well (like the glue not holding on the tiles) he was fully prepared to be discouraged and frustrated.  When things were going well like cutting tiles and placing them on the floor, he knew the positive feelings were an illusion and that trouble was just around the corner.  He was just waiting for things to fall apart.

The last character in this story is a friend of theirs who was able to help for several days; his name is Josh.  Josh does not conform the the stereotype of college art major he is; he is QUITE the handy-man.  Josh helped build his own house, is very knowledgeable about all things home improvement and also can fix your car if you want.  Josh is exactly the kind of guy you want helping you out when you want to retile your kitchen.  Josh is also a realist.  He expects that there are going to be things that go wrong and his response is to fix them and move on.  When the glue didn't hold Josh was thoroughly committed to pulling up every tile that wasn't firmly attached even if it meant having to re-glue every single one.  Better to put in the time now and get things right rather than have to replace them once the grout was in place.   He didn't get discouraged by the problems (there are always going to be problems) and responded with an attitude determined to fix those problems.  The project will get done, it may just take a little longer than expected.  Don't give up or get discouraged, and don't emotionally go looking for trouble; do the job, fix the mistakes.

I think this attitude of realism is the classical American "can-do" spirit.  In this regard, I think I need to be more American when we re-start our home improvement project here in the next few weeks.