D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
September 2009
Between a Rock and a Hardwood Floor
There's no place like home — not after it's undergone an extreme makeover.
With television in the summer-rerun doldrums, we've spent a lot of time the past few months watching home-improvement shows. You know the sort of program that I mean: Some designer swoops in and turns your living room into a bathroom, or swaps out your ceiling fans and TV set (ironically, TV designers hate TVs, and apparently none has ever lived in a place where air needs to circulate) for a wrought-iron sculpture of a giraffe. Or a real-estate agent shows some clueless couple three different homes and they have to pick where they want to someday be foreclosed upon.
After a summer's worth of viewing these shows, I confess that they all start to blend together: "Desperate House Hunters," "Extreme Real Estate Renovation," "Color My Landscape Reality Check," "My First Property Virgin," "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Makeovers."
What does stick with me through this blur of paint swatches, garden gnomes and double sinks is a nagging sense that our parents' generation would be utterly flummoxed by what today's home buyers and relentless renovators drool over.
Just the other evening, for example, we watched a first-time home buyer wrinkle her nose in disgust at the flooring in a house she was being shown. "Carpet!" she said, in a tone suggesting the floor was covered in writhing dung beetles. "I don't want carpet. I want hardwood floors."
Set aside for a moment that this feckless twentysomething expects a picture-perfect mansion for her first house, not the "starter home" or "fixer-upper" that her parents doubtlessly settled for. No, concentrate on her abhorrence of carpeting — the very floor covering that home buyers in the 1950s and 1960s viewed as the embodiment of all things luxurious and warm. Those settling the suburban frontier in the post-war years rightly figured that, by golly, they'd bested Hitler and Tojo, and they deserved something soft on their feet in return. Not for them the scratchy, unyielding hardwood floors of their parents' houses! The floors of the second half of the 20th century would be swathed in carpet. Wall-to-wall carpet!
Every square inch of floor in the house my parents built in the early 1960s, save only the kitchen and bathrooms and the basement, was carpeted. If we even knew any poor souls who had to walk on hardwood floors, they were, well, poor. Old farmhouses, maybe, like that inhabited by Timmy and Lassie, had hardwood floors. People in black-and-white movies walked on hardwood floors, the poor bastards.
Now, I'm not making a judgment on the relative merits of carpeting versus hardwood. To be sure, the carpeting frenzy of the 1960s got carried away. (One word: "shag.") Some of the color choices grew extreme (orange carpet?). Indeed, we've been gradually replacing much of the carpet in our house here, and my wife already has designs on the second and third bedrooms, two of the last carpeted holdouts.
The point is how far the flooring-fashion pendulum has swung. And it will probably swing right back just as soon as my wife has replaced the last stitch of carpeting with laminated wood flooring. A new wave of home-improvement shows — "Carpet My World" and "Extreme Carpeting" — will preach the gospel of wall-to-wall carpeting, and we'll have to start all over again.
Countertops represent another trend that would make our parents blanch. Back when, they reveled in new, manmade materials such as Formica. Today, even those "property virgins" with their $159 down payments demand granite countertops, or possibly concrete. Can you imagine Mom and Dad's reaction to a kitchen with concrete countertops? What is this, "The Flintstones"?
Again, I claim no moral high ground here in resisting this trend. We replaced our kitchen countertops — white tiles with grout in-between that captured every speck of stray sauce or ketchup carelessness — with, yes, granite. Our granite guy assured us that the stone we selected was unique in all the world. Since then, we've seen our unique granite adorning kitchens in shows ranging from "Divine Redesign" to "Shootout of the Design-Show Stars" to "Kitchen Makeover Cage Fight."
We shouldn't be surprised. Heck, he also promised the job would be done in a day and a half. Where was the camera crew from "Kitchen Remodeling Nightmares"?
Everyone on these home-improvement and real-estate shows wants stainless-steel appliances, too. Show a fledgling home buyer or participant on "House Hunters Death March" the almond- or avocado-colored stoves and refrigerators our parents adored and they'd break out the wrecking ball.
For home buyers of the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, however, appliances were not supposed to resemble industrial gear. They had no interest in making their kitchens resemble factories. Stainless steel? Darling, we have color now. Throw away your ration books and install some lovely avocado-green appliances.
As I recall, the model kitchen of tomorrow where Khrushchev and Nixon held their famous "kitchen debate" in 1959 was decked out in soothing hues and state-of-the-art Formica. If it had featured stainless steel and granite, the Soviet premier and US vice president might have come to blows and triggered World War III. ("We will bury you — in tombs of granite just like this, with a pattern that's unique in all the world!" Khrushchev screeches. "We will forge your capitalist stainless-steel refrigerator doors into swords to slay you with!")
In any case, I can't help but wonder what our parents would have thought of the must-have features of today's extremely made-over homes. Magically transported to one of 2009's trendy home shows — "Extreme Open House Crashers" or "Foreclosure Fixit," say — they'd be appalled.
"Where is the carpet?" Mom might wonder aloud, trying to be polite but quietly speculating that some Dust Bowl farm family must live here. (Timmy will be home from school any minute, if he doesn't fall in the well and require yet another Lassie rescue.) "Is this bare wood on the floors? Can't they at least afford some rugs?"
"Did Fred Flintstone build this kitchen?" Dad might say, less solicitous of the hapless homeowners' feelings. (Or simply unaware of the hidden-camera technology of 2009 that allows the aghast homeowners to see and hear every caustic comment.) "Or maybe Mussolini? Is that stainless steel? Is this a kitchen or a Nash auto assembly line? I think this refrigerator door was made from the grille on my Rambler."
Mom runs a cautious finger over the granite countertop. "Well, this certainly appears, um, sturdy." Informed that, unlike her precious Formica, granite requires periodic sealing, she tut-tuts. Clearly the world has regressed since her time — and this is before she's even seen Fox News.
"Not a lick of carpet in this whole dang hovel," Dad mutters about the $1.5 million showplace, which sold for twice that before the houses on either side got foreclosed. "Is this one of those 'projects' for poor people we've heard about?" He looks around nervously. "Did we get plunked down in the ghetto?"
"Poor dears can't afford even the cheaper almond-colored appliances," Mom murmurs.
Cautiously exploring the bathroom, she eyes a sink whose bowl is set on top of the countertop, rather than recessed within. "Honey, look at this sad ol' wash basin," she calls to her husband, who's kicking disgustedly at the living-room floor. "And this countertop — can this be concrete? Oh, dear."
"Tell me true, son," Dad is saying to a befuddled cameraman. "Did the Commies do this? Did they win the Cold War?"
Not to worry, Mom and Dad. What goes around comes around, after all. Pretty soon, spoiled, flighty twentysomethings on "My First Dream House" will be turning up their noses at hardwood floors and longing for carpet — wall-to-wall carpet. Families subjected to "Desperately Extreme Home Redo" will have their hopelessly outdated stainless-steel appliances replaced by the latest avocado-colored stoves and refrigerators. Out goes the granite, in comes the Formica.
Maybe tomorrow's trendy designers can even be persuaded to leave the ceiling fans and find a place for the TV set — so the homeowners can actually watch their house on "Extreme Renovation Showdown."