A FRESH START
When I first saw our new living room floor upon our return to Rome three months ago, I blanched. My face turned the color of the pavement in front of me.
In place of the living room’s original wooden floorboards was a sea of shiny, white marble tiles. What used to be a cozy room now looks like an indoor ice-skating rink. I could already imagine Brian Boitano twirling pirouettes around our couches with his Olympic Gold medal dangling from his neck. It’s a cross between the waiting room of a doctor’s office and a nail salon. A friend took one look at it in a photograph and declared it Cesar’s Palace, as in the one in Las Vegas.
We are fortunate to own an apartment in Rome, which we rent out when we are posted overseas. In our retirement, I’m hoping we will have saved enough to transform it into a hodgepodge of my favorite rooms from houses we have rented: the living room in San Francisco, our bedroom in Brussels, and our garden in Tel Aviv. Until then, we feel middle-aged as we go down the check-list of maintenance house projects.
Before leaving California to move back to Italy, we had decided it was time to redo our living room floor. Its wooden floorboards had buckled with age, water, wear and tear. The idea was to lighten up the living room with a golden, wooden floor, add some light fixtures, and turn a window into a door to welcome in natural light from the ground-floor garden.
As is often the case in the foreign service, you have to manage most home renovations by remote control. Micro-managing is close to impossible when continents and time zones divide you.
You’ll probably end up with close to what you want. For me, close enough is fantastic. Owning our own home is already a luxury. I’m grateful to anyone who can do the work for us while we are gone. If the kitchen cabinets still wobble, the front door still creaks, and the color of the bedroom walls is slightly off, I’ve learned to let it go.
After a flurry of emails and phone calls with a trusted contractor in Rome, we pushed go from San Francisco on what seemed like a straight-forward project. Despite our correspondence, something had evidently slipped through the cracks. From afar in San Francisco, we often dealt with the paperwork of the renovation late at night, not my finest hour. Neither my husband nor I had realized our mistake in the choice of the floor’s material until it was cemented into our salotto.
How did “legno” turn to “marmo”? We will never know, and it’s too late to weed through my inbox.
“At least you have more light,” the contractor pointed out, which, in fairness, had been my initial request.
With the doors to our ground-floor garden open and natural light streaming in on the glaring tiles, the living room is now an ideal backdrop for a yoga studio, a dojo or a roller rink.
Perhaps this was a subconscious, post-pandemic message – why not transform our living room’s backdrop for dance parties instead of dinner parties and movie nights instead of mingling meet-ups?
Recently, this room took on a new life. It was my kids who helped me see it as a clean slab, a blank piece of white paper, challenging me to start afresh.
About a month ago, three of my son’s friends from San Francisco decided to surprise him during their fall break from school, and they showed up on our doorstep in Rome. Their parents were booked at nearby hotels – and the kids were planning to bunk up with us. Word was evidently out that, without any furniture yet in our house, we had space.
In this transitional period of moving from San Francisco to Rome, we are still waiting for our container to arrive from America. It has been almost four months. I barely have enough mattresses for us, let alone houseguests. For the past two months, we’ve been sleeping on borrowed mattresses. We have more furniture outside in our garden than inside our kitchen. We may be fortunate to own the real estate we are now living in but we’ve been unlucky, in this move, with the furniture that normally fills it.
As we travel around to countries, we ship all of our belongings. Everything. It’s wonderful to have possessions which make you feel at home wherever you go. But I am the first to admit that it is nuts to ship everything from your piano to your prosciutto slicer (and, clearly, the Italian government is starting to agree as cutbacks have been drastic in reimbursements for a move). My husband and I have decided that, once our furniture arrives this time, it is never, ever leaving this apartment again. I’m done with containers and vessels.
Our entire apartment in San Francisco, with all its furniture, pictures, beds, kitchenware, clothes, and appliances, sat in a container in Oakland for a month after we sealed it shut at the end of June. It’s now late October and the fall foliage is arriving on our Roman street. My resort wear of bathing-suit coverups and flip-flops, which worked well on our August vacation in Puglia, isn’t entirely appropriate for the fall season of meet-the-parents’ nights at my kids’ new schools. This pandemic has paralyzed the ports around the world, as they are backed-up and bottle-necked. Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on hospitals and high waters.
The vessel carrying our container from America to Europe is called the Seoul Express. Its name leads me to believe it’s not headed in the right direction. Since its departure from California, it has taken the non-express route, and, like a leisure cruise ship, detoured to ports in Seattle, Vancouver, Long Beach, Mexico, Colombia, and, most recently, through the Panama Canal. I often wonder if the captain is playing our piano while nibbling on prosciutto from our slicer as he docks in Valencia, for instance, on his next stop. The vessel finder website that we check daily reports that our shipment is pulling into Livorno shortly. We are hoping to have our knives to carve pumpkins by Halloween.
This past month, with three additional teenagers under our roof, and three inflatable mattresses floating on top of the new, shiny tiles, the living room looked somewhere between a hurricane shelter and an REI showroom. Bare light bulbs not yet turned into light fixtures dangle from electrical units. The contractor’s pencilings scribbled on the blank walls still need to be painted over with a cheerful color. A collapsed laundry rack of drying clothes lies flat on the floor. The other day, I found my son peeling off a pair of dry, clean socks, and leaving the rest on the floor.
This room, when transformed into a dorm, offered a happy space for my son, who is homesick for his life and friends in San Francisco. To hear teenage boys’ laughter and their Spotify playlists echoing off the stark walls warmed up the cold room.
We have decided to add a projector and a screen to the new living room, with the hope that our teenage kids opt to spend time at home with us and their friends. Popcorn on the marble tiles, Dolby stereo ricocheting movies in English and Italian off the walls. Bring on those last-minute house guests. Once our rugs, couches, pictures and coffee table arrive, the room will become the heart of the home.
The experience of renovating our living room confirmed the uncertainty of all that we deal with in living and working in the foreign service. There is so much you have to let go of – from where you end up being posted to when your life’s belongings might reach you. There is so little over which you have control. Letting go is crucial to survival. I have learned how to be flexible often because I don’t have a choice.
We’ve worked hard to secure this home, and we feel fortunate to return to it. But life is too short to obsess over the living room floor. I’ve decided to pass the popcorn, and sit back to enjoy the show. And I’ve invited Brian Boitano to skate at intermission over Thanksgiving.
