If a relationship can survive home renovations, it can survive anything.
We have been “renovating” a fixer-upper for the last 18 months and likely for the next 18 as well. The amount of blood, sweat, tears, emotions and foul language that has gone into this utterly foolhardy, impulsive and idiotic “good idea” is immeasurable both in monetary terms and testing of wills. The fucking house just keeps on throwing shit surprises at us and it doesnt help much that the s/o is a planner and Im a do-er, he gets stuck in endless preparations in his head and I phone the tiler and builder to get on with it which pisses him off as he can only manage one thing at a time.
So right now we have a half loft area which houses a temporary main bedroom, a bathroom which is half tiled, a sunroom full of paraphanalia such as cement, bonding liquid, shreds of tiles, screwdrivers, scrapers, tilecutters and other necessary shit. Downstairs we have wide empty half tiled rooms, no front door because that was bricked up for some fodforsaken reason so we are entering via a side door, paint is peeling off all the walls due to a latent damp issue which we cannot repaint until sorted. The balustrades upstairs have been removed and you need to negotiate your way reallycarefully if you dont want to brain yourself on the half tiled floors 6 feet down in the middle of the night on the way to the loo. Outside we have an eight foot wall deciding when it wants to moer over - we got a steel cable trying to keep it stable until we have money to fix that.
Im going off my effing rocker as nothing can be found when needed and magically appears as soon as you return from the shop buying a replacement. We have gotten used to extra crunchy bits in our food and keeping soap and toothbrushes in plastic packets to keep the dust from forming a lovely paste on it.
We go through moments of intense dislike of each other to admire the almost finished whatever we are busy with thing. In all honesty, its easier to raise a child than live through renovations.