Nesting needs differ for nonhandy families

Everybody we know is remodeling.

My friend Karin and her husband just gutted and renovated their kitchen.

My friend Kara put a bathroom in her basement.

Even my neo-feminist friend Elizabeth, who denies all domestic tendencies, put in a new vanity.

We, in the meanwhile, have the same grout on our bathtub that we had when we moved into our house in 1997.

The deck we vowed to reseal every spring looks like the back side of a deserted barn.

The basement we talked about converting into a rec room when our son was in third grade remains a concrete shell with three years of his childhood left to go.

It’s not that my husband and I don’t appreciate our home or our family’s changing needs.

It’s just that neither of us knows how to use a power drill.

Unlike my father, the only work my college-professor husband does with his hands is type. He quit going to my son’s Cub Scout camp outs because he couldn’t talk about band saws with the rest of the dads.

As for me, I refuse to go to Home Depot by myself. Like the people on “Trading Spaces,” I need a crew to rip out carpet.

This is not to say we haven’t done anything to maintain or improve our home. In the seven years we have lived here, we washed the siding. Once. And sealed the deck. Once. We cleaned the gutters. Once.

And lest I forget, last winter, in a sudden burst of creative energy and mother guilt, I led the repainting of my 11-year-old daughter’s room, which she’d been requesting for six years.

It took us four weeks, three coats and several hours of scrubbing the hardwood floor afterward, as I apparently didn’t realize the value of a drop cloth.

But in the end, my daughter and I had single-handedly transformed her upstairs Cape Cod walls and ceiling from Submissive Low Esteem Pale Yellow to Bold Passionate Sweet Lilac. To this day I get faint every time I pass her doorway. Oh, the rewards of home improvement.

Oh, the costs. But truly, this isn’t the kind of renovation I’m talking about.

The kind of renovation I’m talking about is the ripping-out-the-kitchen kind, a significant assault on form and structure that finally annihilates those outdated counters with the little shelves at the end and the mustard-colored floor that looks like a few too many eggs were dropped on it. I’m talking dry wall and sky lights. I’m talking men in hard hats wiping sweat from their brows while homeowners walk around with a spiral notebook and a T-square, yelling that the walls are not square with the floor. This is, after all, the latest version of the American dream.

The home improvements industry, boosted by a post-9/11 desire to “nest,” increased by 12 percent in 2002 to become a $123 billion industry and was expected to increase another 13 percent by 2004.

So there’s plenty in this circa-1950, small-closeted, ratty-kitchen, one-car-garage, unfinished-basement house to renovate.

So even if we’re not handy, we could hire out. So maybe we have a problem taking out a second mortgage to renovate the kitchen. But it’s more than that.

Every Sunday, on the long drive home from church in a neighboring town, our family ogles houses for sale that were built with two- and even three-car garages, big, modern kitchens, oversized closets, skylights and rec rooms.

“That one looks nice!” one of us says. “Take down that Realtor’s number!” says another. “I got the spec sheet!” says somebody else.

The kids fight over who gets to see the spec sheet first so they can lead the contest to guess the list price. We fantasize over who gets which bedroom and what we would do with the 12-by-6 space labeled “extra room.”

Of course, we never look at the house. We always go back to the one we’re in and think about the equity we would lose. And then we start talking about remodeling the basement again.

The problem is, if we ever remodeled, we would have to stop this ritual.

We would have to commit.

I look at that mustard-colored floor in the kitchen and I think, “This is my destiny.”