Why recovery is like renovating a house

This thought came to me this morning. For us, recovery from anorexia is like renovating a house - one of those 'Help My House is Falling Down' type houses on that telly programme. It's been a heck of a job to get it looking anywhere near normal, not to mention all the essential and time-consuming structural work you've had to do behind the scenes.


Right now, our 'house' looks pretty good. Or at least it does if you don't look too closely. Maybe the architrave around the kitchen door still needs another lick of paint. There are slight cosmetic cracks in the plasterwork where the new brickwork has settled. The living room wall is still missing a piece of wallpaper behind the curtains and the state-of-the-art new bathroom shower has all the workings in place, but the actual shiny chrome shower attachment is still waiting to go up.

However it's all cosmetic. The horrendous rising damp has been sorted out, the sagging roof has got new rafters, felting and insulation. The dry rot underneath the bathroom floor has been fixed. And the serious subsidence that was threatening to reduce the house to a pile of rubble has been underpinned securely and (we hope) permanently.

The building inspectors have been in and given our 'house' the thumbs up and we are able to live here comfortably and safely.

It will take a little while... maybe even a little longer than a while... to sort out the little glitches: the 'snagging' as my electrician husband would call it. But it's nothing that can't be done in a free weekend with a few bits and pieces from the local DIY store.

And, of course, we'll keep an eye on all those structural nasties that have been fixed - just to make sure they're well and truly gone for good.

After all, you wouldn't want to do all that hard work only to find your 'house' starts to sink back into the foundations in 12 months' time, would you?