I
get real revved up about house modifications. This is definitely a trait I inherited from my mother, who loves nothing more than imagining how she can reshape her living space. I find this habit of identifying problems in your life and making concrete efforts to fix them extremely admirable, and it is never given better form than in the shaping of one's own home. The only difference between me and my mother on this front is that I'm trying to do everything myself, instead of hiring people.
Before I started work as a carpenter, I lived as a typical citizen of our technologically advanced, secular age -- I assumed everything was magic. From childhood, I was raised to accept the wondrous tools, toys, and devices that continually rolled forth into my delighted hands, and I was equally poised to accept their creation as completely incomprehensible. From factories, to computer chips, to materials science, the actual origins of the objects I used on a day-to-day basis were shrouded in mystery, produced by geniuses in far-off places, using techniques I would never understand.
But when you are raised in such an environment, it never even occurs to you to ask how things are put together. You come to see the world as composed solely of "wholes", and it gets very hard to see those wholes as also composed of "parts". Everything is just so perfect.
I bore even myself with the repitition, but it was not always so. It used to be that just about everything that the average person saw or touched in their lives was made within a few miles of them, using techniques that, even if their execution was beyond oneself, could be readily understood. What I'm driving at here, is that when you understand how things are put together, you are empowered, and conversely, when you are a passive receiver of magical trinkets, you are helpless.
Homes used to be magic to me; I imagined them constructed by geniuses using precision parts and fastened using masterful techniques to produce the house, that you would go on to buy and sell. Now, I see that houses are made of glorified legos by drunks and fools (and some excellent craftsmen) using techniques any attentive 12-year-old could master. This is not a criticism -- this is an encouragement. The objects that surround us are much more malleable than we give them credit for; they can be used creatively in more ways than we think; and we are capable of doing without them (or with homemade substitutes) a surprising amount of the time.
All this is to say, the first time I tore down a wall in my own house was something of a revelation for me. Obviously, I needed to actually own the place first, before I could even think of it. But I also needed to know just a little bit about what was waiting for me behind that wall. I needed to be thinking a little bit about how I would repair the wound I was making. But it got me excited, and still does. Re-making the world in little ways, and hopefully improving our lives, is a great hobby. I'm preparing to tear down another, much bigger, wall now. I can't stop thinking about it, and how I'll feel about the space will spring into being in its place.