BUILDING HIS CASE AGAINST REMODELING.

Byline: Jonathan Dobrer

WE completed our major remodel about two years ago. We encountered the normal ``mission creep'' of starting one project and expanding till we didn't just run out of ambition, but both money and, more seriously, credit.

We tripled the original estimate, but this was not our most serious mistake; that would be that we thought we understood English. We thought we knew what ``waterproof'' meant. We only found out the error of our understanding more than a year after completion.

Our project expanded normally, and the kitchen remodel, which was once conceived as an update of appliances, eventually necessitated seven 27- foot-deep caissons. These were dug so that on our hillside location the caissons would not go rollin' along when the rains came. The kitchen counter that came out of the wall like a peninsula became an island in the first plan but eventually grew into subcontinent status. The master suite makeover, never originally envisioned at all, morphed into raising the ceiling and installing a spa tub - large enough to poach Shamu - and a steam shower with five shower heads so we can cleanse body parts we never really knew about before. All of these advanced hygiene devices are encased in glass and surrounded by mirrors.

There is an irony here. By the time you mistakenly believe you can afford a master bath like this, you really don't have the kind of body you necessarily want surrounded by clear glass and then being infinitely reproduced in mirrors. Thank goodness for nature mercifully applying fuzzy lenses to our aging eyes.

I also learned about bathroom appliances and saw the full range of aptly named ``high end'' toilets. Once upon a time, buying a toilet was pretty easy. High flow or low flow. Not any more. Now they have electric motors to boost the flush, washing devices for your nether regions and blowers to dry same said nether regions.

One of the other English words I learned about was ``mortgage.'' This comes from the Latin ``mort,'' and literally means ``death pledge.'' It is a promise that you will keep on paying even after you're dead. Ultimate judgment may not be simply divine. It may also be a function of your credit scores, which like Marley's chains, we forge with our misspent, or overspent, lives.

The really shocking life lesson from this remodel was about the meaning of waterproof. First of all, I now consider myself to be a prisoner of the squeegee. The shower has to be squeegeed and dried after every use or all that glass develops streaks and mineral deposits.

Then there is the marble bench in the shower. Marble, I remembered too late, is several degrees (seems like a hundred degrees) colder than the ambient temperature. So, the first time I sat down on the bench to rest from my 105-degree steam, I was ill-prepared for the shock to my instantly puckered posterior and jumped almost high enough to hit my head on the ceiling. Fortunately my rapid rise was stopped by one of the five shower heads leaving me with well-balanced pain at both ends. Talk about a rude awakening.

Now, here comes the real nasty surprise. The marble counters and floors in the bathroom and the beautiful polished granite kitchen counters and island, qua subcontinent, are only technically waterproof. Sure, they tolerate water. This means that they don't melt or dissolve. The catch is they are only immune to pure water, water free of chlorine; water as it appears only in some theoretical form in antiseptic laboratories but not any water that actually exists on this planet.

You see, while water is fine, chlorine leaves acid bleached spots. Thus, every time the shower, floor or counter encounters a drop of water, it has to be instantly removed and the surface dried and polished - or it will leave a permanent record of its visit.

My mantra, as I scrubbed, became Shakespeare's, ``Out, out damn spot.''

We called in a marble and granite guru to examine our once-shiny surfaces, which now resembled Jackson Pollack at his most, uh, creative. The guru said, in a compassionate manner, that this is to be expected when you let marble or granite get wet.

``But, but, but,'' I stammered, ``these were made for bathrooms and kitchens where surely someone, a designer or architect, could have reasonably foreseen that water might come into play.''

The guru shook his head sadly and observed that he didn't know why people didn't understand that unless you employed a full-time squeegee man, you'd just have to live with the spots until you called him in to machine grind and hand-polish a brand new and only transitorily spotless surface.

Ah the fleeting nature of perfection. I should have remembered another Shakespeare quote:

``Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rime;

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time.''

So, I give up. I'm counting on my ever more opaque eyes to blur the imperfections. I'm also trying to develop a fondness for Jackson Pollack.