This week was spent on a “small” home improve­ment project, out of town. Not much time taken to write, which in a sense is good, and in a sense ill.

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I have the feel­ing that many of the younger aca­d­e­mics who seem to make up my read­ers are peren­nial renters; I see a lot of novice home­owner stuff crop­ping up in my recent blog­gish read­ing, which dis­cusses the com­plex­i­ties of even minor house­hold tasks like lawn mow­ing, pur­chas­ing fur­ni­ture, &c.

On the assump­tion that some of these folks will even­tu­ally become home­own­ers and need to learn which one is the hole in the ground, I’d like to pass along one bit of advice, hard-​​earned bit, of the sort that I have repeat­edly ignored to my inevitable regret and real, phys­i­cal pain:

Do not imag­ine that bath­rooms, because they are small, are in any sense eas­ier to work on. This cov­ers all aspects of work: paint­ing, sim­ple wall repair, floor­ing, elec­tri­cal work, win­dow treat­ments. Bath­rooms, even though they get steady wear and tear and go out of date quickly, are not the place to begin. The wall­pa­per is inevitably hard to remove, unex­pected time-​​eating hor­rors lurk (espe­cially in cor­ners; Love­craft was talk­ing about bath­rooms) for those who remove tile, the paint­ing is more than half cutting-​​in, every piece of floor­ing will be fid­dly and oddly-​​shaped and cut on three sides and can­not be so fash­ioned as to avoid all the obstruc­tions (no mat­ter how much trigonom­e­try and template-​​making you bring to bear), and the wiring of a 20-​​pound wall fix­ture (which takes two peo­ple and a lad­der and involves lit­tle teeny easily-​​dropped bits) is more or less a nightmare.

This, our sixth renovated/​redecorated bath­room, went more smoothly than most. That’s about when you get used to them — around the fifth or sixth. Take my advice: stick to big, long-​​walled bed­rooms and liv­ing rooms till you get the hang of things a bit. You are deceived if you think a larger wall will take longer to address than a short one. In home improve­ment, always remem­ber that area is your com­pan­ion and helper; perime­ter your insid­i­ous and quirky enemy.…
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So it was with great plea­sure that I found two big boxes had arrived while we were gone, and were sit­ting on the floor of the foyer when we got home from our fam­ily ren­o­va­tion excur­sion. I tore into them.

These boxes con­tained some of the pret­ti­est books I’ve ever had the plea­sure to acquire: The first six vol­umes of Bel­gravia mag­a­zine, two full vol­umes of the Knicker­bocker Monthly Mag­a­zine, and a cou­ple of other mis­cel­la­neous peri­od­i­cal vol­umes (The Rad­i­cal, and The Pic­to­r­ial Fam­ily Mag­a­zine). Unlike a lot of the VOBs we’ve bought through the years, these are pris­tine, in fine half-​​morocco bind­ings, and look as if they’d be at home on a shelf behind a learned scholar or in a fire-​​lit draw­ing room. Absolutely stunning.

And think­ing about my intense plea­sure at these phys­i­cal and cul­tural arti­facts, and the plea­sure, not of own­ing them (I am no miser), but of hav­ing them around — of being graced with their pres­ence — you know what I real­ized I sound like? A gar­den club person.

Librar­i­ans are to hor­ti­cul­tur­ists, as we are to gar­den club offi­cers. Many peo­ple who “like” books are con­tent with vis­it­ing vast archives and libraries main­tained by long-​​respected insti­tu­tions: Kew and the British Library; the Library of Con­gress and Butchart Gar­dens. Some folks are happy to hit the Recent Releases at the library and the plants at Home Depot, some folks are happy with Book of the Month Club and Burpee; oth­ers hunt and pre­serve heir­loom vari­eties and anti­quar­ian objects.

Is this just an aspect of any suf­fi­ciently advanced case of afi­cionado­ism? Dunno. Rock­hound­ing? Local history?