Tantric Home Renovations

August 2025

My knees ached from the bulk of my weight pressing into them against the hard floor, while my hands moved back and forth vigorously, scrubbing away at the 70 year old linoleum floors. These are the original floors that Grandma Lenhart picked out when the house was built back in the 50’s- a checkerboard of floral white squares worn brown with age. This year we’ve been renovating the old kitchen in the completely wrong order of events, leaving the floor for very last. The new cabinets have been hung and fresh stone countertops laid upon them. Even the green backsplash tile has gone in, my favorite part. I labored over choosing tile for months, and on the precipice of paying $300 to ship hand made zellige tile from California (that I frankly, could not afford), I finally relented and found a similar thing at a hardware store in Lititz. This whole process of tearing apart and imagining new the house I’ve lived in with Adam for the last 7 years has been so weirdly alchemical and dare I say magical. We’ve neglected a lot of the renovations and repairs because it’s his family home, and nostalgia and memory is threaded into even the most unsuspecting of things, like the rusted can of WD40 nestled under the cellar door, to the large 3 way vanity mirror in the bathroom, and most especially, the wall to wall red carpeting. We’re contending with ancestry, history, and possession, at a time when we are really working to imagine up our future, what can be borne to this home and what can grow from a new foundation. I’ve started to refer to the project as “tantric home renovation” because what is it but a ritual altar for our lives.

If home is not only a metaphor, but an altar, then the work we do within it is the kindling for that fire of transformation. I think of the homa fire, to which you offer ghee, flowers, rice, prayers, and in turn the fire alchemizes the offerings, creates a doorway. At a time when I am hoping for big changes, it makes sense that all of this home work would be ripe and ready for the picking. New fixtures, sanding down the doors for fresh coats of paint, scrubbing linoleum to make room for new planks to be laid in their place. It’s all a strange ritual dance, and in brief moments I can glimpse it, see behind the curtain of the sweat magic that I’m working. For all the things I can’t change about myself, my house instead gives me this perfect landscape to re-imagine, re-do, to improve, to make new. And what I realize, is the house in the deepest sense remains unchanged. It will never not be his grandparents home, his father will never not have grown up within these walls. The red carpet will always have been here, even after we tore it out last Friday- painstakingly prying up ancient staples and tack boards by hand, together.

It’s taken years for Adam to be ready to let the carpet go, and over those years I’ve formed my own relationship to the shockingly red floors. When I first started coming over to this house, when Adam and I were first dating and falling in love, I remember how odd and memorable they were, how they always smelled like Nag Champa incense and would get warm when the sun would soak through the windows. Now it smells more like the many dogs who have rolled around and scratched themselves in the tight weave, and the color has become an enemy to any and every interior design initiative I’ve attempted. At worst, when on a black cherry edible, I’ve experienced the carpet as a manifestation of my failure in life- a persistent and musty insistence that this is why I’m not where I think I should be, that the carpet still being nailed to the floor is evidence for the very thing that is wrong with me, why my life looks and feels the way it does.

I don’t want to say that on Friday I hugged the jelly rolled strips and thanked them, but once the carpet was gone I had enough room to breathe, and to feel glad for a weird carpet, for all the friends who have laid out and lounged on it. I understand that nostalgia doesn’t always mean you have to miss a thing, or wish for it back, but that we can remember almost anything and hold it’s best version in our hands, let ourselves become full with what good it has been rather than swallow the hard feelings that are now out of date.

Repairing this home feels like very intimate and personal work, though it is all being done without a road map. I am in no way cognizant of how pulverizing the kitchen, planting 8 hydrangeas, or repainting the porch correlate to any inner, spiritual transformation. I can’t draw any direct lines or make any sense of the workings, but in a large way that has been the greatest pleasure of the whole thing. Materially, I am committed to bringing a vision to life, and whatever happens to me as a person is icing on the cake, a mystery, grace even. A friend once told me, “If a couple can stay together after renovating their house, then it’s a relationship likely to stand the test of time.” And I think about all of the other hard shit I have been through with Adam- losing best friends to overdose, a global pandemic, long distance, having to close an almost decade old business, moving states, turning down a tattoo apprenticeship, sending his father’s ashes out to sea, and renovating this house feels like light work in comparison. And yet I also understand the sentiment, that it isn’t insignificant to tear something apart that once was, and have to trust that something new will in fact grow in it’s place, and that the new thing that emerges will be better than what was. I think, that it is an exercise in faith, but most of all, in waiting.

For all the years we’ve lived together, I’ve been waiting for the shoe to drop and the day to come when I have to reinvent my life somewhere new. I’ve lived a pattern of sudden endings, of things falling out beneath me, of discovering myself just not enough to make it work. So rather than relax into the man who says “I love you, this is your home too”, I have held tight, just incase, just incase I need to pick myself up again. I have resisted putting too much a mark on this place not only because I felt no possession of it, but because I was afraid of giving too much of myself to this home that could disappear.

The kitchen went in slowly, in part because I had no idea what I was doing, but primarily because we hired friends to do all of the separate work, and hustled to save in between. So over the months, as first the demolition and cabinets went up, then a couple weeks later the counters and sink, a few more months and the tile, a feverish afternoon of me painting, and a month or so after that the floor, it became my kitchen too. No longer was I holding out an escape route because I needed all of the creative imagination to put this thing together. It was liberating, the necessity to give my whole self to the project. I realized, this is my home, this is my partner, this is my life. Sitting on the new luxury vinyl floor, I was overcome by relief, for I had allowed myself to be chosen, and to choose.

What I am discovering is a confidence emerging from this newfound sense of home and stability. I hadn’t realized how scared I was and how much energy it required to maintain the scaredness. I remember once my teacher asked me, “Imagine how much time you would have, if you stopped worrying about how much you weigh,” and I was flabbergasted by the idea, that there could be so much more time, energy available to me.

This house is still a red carpeted mountain to climb, the upstairs still waiting to be undone, a bathroom that will need to be stripped and sanded and sawed into, yard work and landscaping that seems never ending. Every homeowner I tell nods their head because I am learning that a house will always need to be tended, not so differently from the ways that my relationship with my partner, and myself, will need to be cared for indefinitely. Eventually from all that work though, doors will open, responsibilities will appear, opportunities and dreams and possibilities will find their way in, in a large part because together we are setting the table for them. I’m not convinced that my little altar is the only place I can ask the divine to take a seat, because my couch is also quite comfortable, and the patio smells like cinnamon basil and lemongrass, and my new enamelware plates are ready to serve meals on. Should the divine choose to grace me for even a moment, there is room here, and most importantly, room within my own heart, which has become so free from the burden of fear. I think she just might find that the two of us, our spunky dog, flamboyant berber rugs, candle wax covered tables, are finally ready for her, ready for whatever comes next.