Remodeling My Room to Connect With My Father

This was written by Emily, one of our student interns. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.

The month of June is home to one of the classic celebrations of family: Father’s Day. While most spend the day with their fathers whether it be the stereotypical baseball game or barbecue, I spend the day and the week leading up to the holiday living by the philosophy of “grin and bear it.” My father passed away when I was 13 – yes, yes, quite the sob story. Long story short, I grieved, I mourned, I went to therapy and it’s been five years this past January. That’s five years of not really celebrating Father’s Day, so the following is a common occurrence: I try to make plans with friends on a weekend in June and they all inform me that they can’t because, low-and-behold, it’s Father’s Day that weekend. An awkward round of “oh”s and “yeah…”s follows. On the other hand, my close friends know that I always forget about Father’s Day and we make what I like to call “dead dad jokes” because we are Gen Z and that’s how I cope. 

Most of Father’s Day for me is just awkward. My family – consisting of just my mom, my brother, his girlfriend, and me – has dinner with my mom’s dad who is my only living grandfather. But because Father’s Day is not the full-day commitment most people are forced into, I typically find myself pretty bored. Unfortunately for me, I still am required to hang around my family which as an introvert is not the most fun option for a day of semi-emotional turmoil. And when my family is together on Father’s Day, we don’t ever really talk about my dad. My mom would start crying and I would get uncomfortable because I don’t like expressing my emotions and my brother would get mad at me for not being sad enough in his opinion. So to avoid that mess, we just don’t mention it. Therefore, there is an enormous elephant in the room all day.

That’s my typical Father’s Day. But this year I did something slightly different. The actual Sunday of Father’s Day was the same, but the week after – in the spirit of Father’s Day I guess – I remodeled my bedroom. How does this relate to my dead father? Just wait, I’ll get to it, but first some context. My bedroom before the recent renovations had been the same ever since I got upgraded from a crib to a real bed. So this was my childhood bedroom still… and for those wondering, I’m 19. I’m talking about lilac, yellow, and light green walls with butterfly and dragonfly wallpaper. Sometime in high school, I did get a new bed but only because my bed frame was falling apart. Other than that and a bookshelf I added in middle school, all the furniture was the exact same. I even only rearranged the layout of my room once in all those years. Going to college made me realize how much I hated my room and so I wanted a complete change.

How my father factors into this is that he was the one who designed and decorated my room for little-girl me. He’s the one who painted, put up the wallpaper, and even added a trim along the center of the walls that wrapped around my entire room. Naturally, I destroyed all of it. With the help of a friend, we moved out all the old furniture that I didn’t use anymore; we placed all the things I wanted to keep in a spare room, and we went to work. The first thing that had to go was that trim. I own a lot – almost 400 – books and I wanted a wall of bookshelves. Keeping that trim meant that anchoring those shelves would be a pain. Also it’s out of style so we wanted to get rid of it anyway. We had to pry that trim off the wall and I mean taking a hammer to it and an intense use of arm muscles. Then came scraping off the wallpaper which, thanks to my dad’s handiwork, took a day and a half. Next was spackle and sanding and painting and more spackle and more sanding and more painting. Finally we could do the fun stuff: moving my stuff back in, rearranging it, making an IKEA trip for bookshelves, building those bookshelves, and organizing my books on the shelves. All of this took six days. Six days of almost constant work by my friend and me. To be honest, my body is physically still recovering.

There were many times where my friend and I cursed my father for how he put up the trim and wallpaper because it was making our lives difficult, but it was surprisingly rewarding. Under some parts of the trim, my dad had worked out some math equations and left little notes to himself directly on the drywall. It was the first time in a long while that I got to see my dad’s handwriting. Additionally, my father was always my family’s personal handyman and he was always the one to fix and build things. He even had a whole workshop in our basement and another one in our garage. My father was a pretty traditional guy so as a kid, he never taught me how to use tools, but he showed my brother. It was always a part of my dad that I never felt connected to. Redoing my bedroom required me to learn quite a bit about the things that my dad would always do, and it honestly made me feel closer to him. The best part of it though is that I know my dad would be proud. My friend and I did all the work ourselves and my room looks pretty amazing, so I know he would be impressed and proud of us.

For a person who hates the sentimental things people usually do for dead loved ones, this was the best way, I think, that I could have honored my dad this past Father’s Day.

I documented the whole process on Tik Tok (I’m Gen Z what do you expect?). Here’s the link to part one:

@emilyyyxleigh

Redoing my childhood bedroom with @randomriley1 and @nicolesbooks17 pt. 1 #renovation #bedroommakeover #bedroom #redocoratingmyroom #remodel

♬ Call me – 90sFlav