Oh wow, my marriage came back to life… after the renovation. I thought we’d forgotten how to feel anything. Sixteen years together, you know? It’s like an old jumper—comfy, familiar, but doesn’t keep you warm anymore.
Will and I had settled into this predictable rhythm—work, dinner, the odd chat before bed. No fights, no dramas, just… existing. Steady, calm, almost like siblings. No sparks, no madness. Sometimes I’d look at us and think we were like two trees growing side by side—roots tangled, but branches stretching in opposite directions.
Then the renovation started.
We only did it because our son, Jake, went off to summer camp by the seaside for the first time. Two whole weeks! “Mum, I’m not a kid anymore!” our 12-year-old declared, shoving his light-up trainers into his suitcase. Will and I stood on the platform waving at the train, and when we got back to the empty flat, it hit us—it’s just us now, and these walls that remember when we were different people.
To speed things up, we rented a tiny one-bed while strangers took over our place—loud, sweaty, smelling of paint. One of them was Mark.
Tall, rough hands, cold eyes. He reminded me of Will when he was younger—his voice, the way he squinted when thinking. But where Will was gentle, never raising his voice even when angry, Mark yelled at his wife over the phone like she owed him something. I’d never heard a man speak to the mother of his kids like that—through gritted teeth, dripping with irritation. Then I found out he had a girlfriend on the side.
One day, I went back for some forgotten blueprints and caught him in the living room with some young woman. She squealed laughing at his crude jokes, and then he grabbed her waist and pinned her against the unpainted wall.
And suddenly, I was scared.
Not for her—for me.
What if Will had some airheaded girl somewhere, thrilled by his attention? What if he’d been living a double life while I was the last to know?
That night, I studied Will over dinner, searching for the same indifference, exhaustion, that itch to escape. Then out of nowhere, he asked:
“You holding up okay with all this chaos?”
Meanwhile, the workmen had stripped the old wallpaper in our flat, and underneath, the traces of our early years emerged. That pink stain? Us, tipsy on bubbly, celebrating moving in. He lifted me up, I shrieked, the bottle slipped—half of it ended up on the wall.
Those nail holes? From the shelf Will spent a whole weekend building while I was at my parents’. “Don’t come in!” he’d yelled through the door as I laughed and stomped impatiently. It was wonky but lasted a decade.
…Three days later, we went wallpaper shopping.
Will, who usually left all decisions to me, suddenly came alive. Picky about shades, asking, “Which ones do you like?” No rushing, no penny-pinching—he was choosing. For us. For our home. He ran his fingers over samples, murmured, “D’you think this pearlescent one will catch the light right?”
Then, in the bedroom section, he reached for pale blue with a faint silver pattern.
“Like that hotel in Cornwall,” he muttered.
I gasped—years before we married, on our first holiday, we’d stayed up all night on the balcony listening to the sea. The walls were exactly that colour.
Later, in the furniture shop, he insisted on a high-backed reading chair—“So you’ve got proper light for your books.”
“How’d you know I’d want that?” I asked.
“Lived with you sixteen years,” he smirked. “Should’ve picked up *something*.”
No irritation in his voice—just warm, quiet tenderness. The kind from our beginning. And I realised: he still loves me. It just got buried under routines, under days blurring into each other.
But it never left.
“Let’s do the bedroom ourselves,” Will said suddenly near the end of the renovation.
I froze.
“You *hate* wallpapering…”
“*Hated*,” he grinned. “Put up with it for our first place, remember?”
Yeah, under years of monotony, that same bloke who trekked across town with coffee in a thermos was still there. We’d just forgotten where we’d tucked each other away.
…Now we’re standing in the bedroom, and Will, just like years ago, mixes up the top and bottom:
“Bloody hell,” he grumbles, “why do they look the same on both sides?”
I laugh and hand him another strip. July rain taps the window, memories flooding back—us painting our first flat, Will smacking a palm into wet paint; him secretly redoing my childhood bedroom wallpaper while I was at uni.
“Gotta finish by the 25th,” I say. “Jake’s back.”
Will nods, then suddenly takes my glue-smeared hand.
“Remember doing his school’s wallpaper?”
How could I forget? Us, the diligent parents of a first-grader, volunteered to do his classroom. The walls were painted, and we didn’t realise you had to strip the gloss first. By morning, every strip peeled off like it was mocking us. We had to scrape it all off and start over.
“We proper messed that up,” I grin, spreading glue.
Will snorts:
“You swore you’d never…”
“…And yet, here we are,” I finish.
His hands—rougher now—smooth each seam, fingers remembering motions from decades ago.
“Just hope they stick,” he mutters, and we both stiffen, remembering that cursed classroom.
“We’re pros now,” I joke.
Will presses the last corner down, and it hits me—we’re not just redoing a flat. We’re preparing a home for our growing-up boy. And ourselves—for a new chapter where it’s just us again, but different.
Somewhere outside, summer hums. Somewhere, a train carries our kid home. And here we are, knee-deep in paint tins and memories, relearning how to be just husband and wife.
But this wallpaper’s different. Like us. It’ll hold, just like our imperfect, time-tested love—sometimes hidden under life’s layers, sometimes resurfacing, like those stains onAnd as the last strip settled into place, I realised love wasn’t something you found—it was something you kept choosing, over and over, even when the walls around you changed.
