A friend and her family have just moved into a beautiful new house. Well, the house is about 80 years old, but it’s new to them.
It was most recently renovated in the 1990s. Living side by side with delightful original features – the fireplaces, my God, the fireplaces – are the telltale signs of late 20th century decor: copious carpeting, liberal splashes of honey oak and an extremely retro archway into the kitchen extension. Nothing in the house screams 1990s more, however, than the handbasins installed in each of the upstairs bedrooms. A variety of pastel colours, and each surrounded by its own sea of carpet.
The new house not only finally gives my friend’s children their own bedroom each, but it also gifts them their own individual sink. What glamour! What luxury! What parallels this draws with my own childhood!
Yes, I too had my own 1990s sink in my room. It was installed by my dad sometime in my tween or early teen years, probably to offer a reprieve from the tyranny of sharing the family bathroom with two older brothers who were constantly, as my mother was hoarse from repeating, “swinging” out of toilet roll, and showing wanton disregard for towel etiquette.
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I, despite being the youngest and the only girl, was not often singled out for princess treatment, but with the advent of the bedroom sink my time had finally arrived. I invited friends over to marvel at it; I arranged and rearranged my Body Shop bath pearls and bottle of Anais Anais perfume around its perimeter; I had my own dedicated tube of toothpaste. The sophistication knew no bounds.
My dad was very handy, but in his own peculiar way. He might install a new light in the sittingroom, but it would only work if a light in a different room in the house was also on and someone jumped on the third step of the stairs four times. I remember begging for a scooter as a child and he – either constrained by budget or inspired by a creative spark. I suspect both – built one out of two-by-fours and some shopping trolley wheels.
The bedroom sink was one of his most solid projects and came complete with a press underneath, finished with another 1990s treasure, louvre doors. There can’t have been a Bungalow Bliss home in Ireland that wasn’t swimming in louvre doors by 1995, along with pelmets, tie-backs, dado rails, wallpaper borders and bowls of potpourri as far as the eye could see.
Nobody does a bedroom ablutions station quite as well as a traditional B&B, whose speciality is a basin so tiny and taps so awkwardly angled that any meaningful functionality doesn’t exist. I once stayed in a B&B in Kerry that went one step further. It had a full shower stall in the corner of the bedroom, which gave me quite a start when I first entered. It had a similar impact to what I imagine it would be like to walk into a room to find a horse standing in the corner. The shower was, naturally, surrounded by deep pile carpet.
[ Emer McLysaght: I’ve changed my mind about BotoxOpens in new window ]
As a student I once rented in a house near Fairview which came complete with a heavily advertised “downstairs WC” which had been installed in an old coat cupboard and completed with a floor-to-ceiling door of brown, frosted, semi-opaque glass. The landlord was inordinately proud of it and seemed oblivious to the fact that anyone settling in to spend a penny was clearly visible to those watching telly. We used it to store the vacuum cleaner and an assortment of junk, and each new visitor to the house was given a demonstration of how utterly redundant the door was.
My friend has inherited a slightly bockety oil-fired central heating system along with the house, which is a new frontier for her. My dad would have been in his element coming to the rescue. Oil-fired heating was a speciality of his; he trained to become a boiler serviceman after retiring from the Air Corps.
As I approach the 18th anniversary of his death my memories and thoughts of him grow fewer and fewer, but walking around my pal’s new home and marvelling at all she’s managed to provide for her family, admiring the abundance of handbasins and hearing the familiar thrum of the boiler springing to life, has given me an unexpected trip back into the annals of my life with him. His legacy is the love and care he put into each (slightly wonky) home renovation project, and while the home-made wooden scooter is lost to the sands of time, my bedroom sink is still going strong, louvre doors and all.
