How to Excel at Handywork Without Drinking

Learning to do hard physical labour without cases of beer.

Early this summer, my husband was in his makeshift office, also known as the garage, on a Zoom meeting when a steady drip of water began pelting him on the head. Never great news, but my husband is handy. A quick diagnostic revealed the drip’s source to be the toilet in our main floor bathroom, and the damage, we discovered when we pulled up the cheap laminate flooring, had penetrated the subfloor.

As we blinked incredulously at a heap of mushy plywood, the truth dawned on us: We were staring down an urgent, expensive, labour-intensive and time-consuming home reno.

Not exactly how I’d planned to spend the first half of summer. Or any part of my summer. My husband may be handy, but I am not, unless it’s to dial a contractor’s number or to order take-out for my hard-working spouse.

Sure, I’ve done a little light DIY in my career as a homeowner. Patching walls and painting and caulking tubs are all more or less in my wheelhouse. Historically, however, I have found even such straightforward tasks go down a lot smoother with a bottle of craft beer at my elbow, along with a case of it in the fridge. For what is a more natural pairing than cold beer and hot physical labour?

Or, put another way, who, in the history of home ownership, has re-grouted their shower without getting half-cut in the process? Who would replace a toilet, tile a floor, patch beaten-up walls without a fridge full of beer at the ready?

Answer: Me.

Not Thinking About (Not) Drinking

While the old me would have hit the liquor store on the way back from the building supplies depot and crammed a couple of cases of beer in the trunk of the car beside boxes of tile and pails of paint, the new me didn’t give it a fleeting thought. Not one. As that pile of plywood disintegrated before my eyes, I wasn’t thinking, “I’m about to renovate a bathroom without the aid of alcohol.”

I was thinking, “I’m about to renovate a bathroom.”

Full stop.

It’s not just that I knew I couldn’t drink while I undertook this Herculean endeavor. It’s that I didn’t even consider drinking while I took it on. Because the truth is that I rarely think about drinking anymore.

This is a marked contrast to my early days of alcohol-free challenges, when drinking and/or not drinking were pretty much all I talked, wrote, dreamt and read about, when I counted down the seconds until I could place a freshly cracked beer to my lips once more. But I haven’t done that in ages, because here’s another truth: Not drinking for almost an entire has been easier than I thought it would be.

This is not what I was expecting back on December 30th, 2019, when I made a public declaration that I was not going to drink for the entirety of 2020 (in fact, my last drink was on October 16th, 2019). While I knew I could do it, I thought it would be hard. Like, possibly not even possible.

But it just hasn’t been. I have not had a drink in 350 relatively painless days. So the question I ask myself now isn’t, “Can I do it?” but rather, “Why have I been able to do it?”

Why has not drinking been fairly easy, or at least easier than I thought it would be? What are the contributing factors to my relative success at sobriety?

There are, I believe, a few worth noting:

Contributing Factor #1 to My Alcohol-Free Success: Practice

The last time I truly craved alcohol was in the spring, at the apex of Covid-induced self-isolation. I was on a video chat with family members, one of whom was sipping white wine from a condensation-dappled stemless glass. The pretty pale fluid looked so appealing, so comforting, at that dawn of uncertainty, when no one knew for how much longer they’d have jobs or eggs or toilet paper. What could be a more soothing balm to our collective skyrocketing anxiety than a cold glass of glinting gold?

The craving was strong, but I knew I wouldn’t succumb. I knew this because I now have a couple of years’ practice in the form of a few extended periods of abstinence which have taught me that cravings always pass, and that their temporary discomfort, while unsettling, is far preferable to the inevitable regret of buckling under temptation.

This was a lesson learned through experience. If I hadn’t successfully powered through so many cravings in those earliest days of my first alcohol-free challenges, I wouldn’t have believed it possible. My resistance may muscle bulge now, but it took years’ worth of reps to get there.

(I qualify the above advice, however, with this disclaimer: My relationship with alcohol was tumultuous at times, but never life-threatening. I understand that some people need to quit drinking as soon as possible, and permanently. There is help.)

Contributing Factor #2 to My Alcohol-Free Success: Accountability to Others, and to Myself

My declaration on social media at the end of 2019 may have been a bold move, but I believed that going public with my intentions would serve as an insurance policy against failure, especially because I had also promised that I would confess if I ever slipped up. I would have kept that promise, but I sure as hell didn’t want to have to.

Accountability to another had been huge for me when I undertook my first 100-day alcohol-free challenge in 2018. More than huge, actually — it was everything. I had enlisted one friend to join me, and we promised each other that we would tell if we ever caved. A string of texts from that time features many messages of this ilk: “I was tempted last night, but I didn’t because I knew I’d have to ‘fess up.” On more than one occasion, that accountability kept me in the game.

But a funny thing happened this time around: accountability to others, once indispensable to my success, became secondary, perhaps not even necessary at all. Earlier in the year, the idea of stepping into a liquor store or pub made me jumpy. What if I saw someone I knew? How would I stammer out an explanation that the six-pack under my arm was for my husband, that the amber liquid in my pint glass was O’Douls?

But somewhere down the line, I stopped caring about what others thought. I was confident, unshakeable in my knowledge that not only was that six-pack under my arm not for me, but that I wasn’t even tempted by it. If an acquaintance saw me and assumed I’d fallen off the wagon, I no longer considered that to be my problem.

I have broken some other promises to myself over the course of this year. I haven’t written here nearly as much as I intended to, I haven’t run that 10K I dreamed of, or learned how to play “She’s Always a Woman” on piano. But these unrealized promises don’t break my heart. My excuse for not doing these things is mostly justifiable, related to the continuous presence of my children for six consecutive months during their school closures. Like everyone else this year, I had to shift gears and shelve plans.

My most important promise to myself remains intact, and keeping that promise has yielded a deeper reward than I ever could have dreamed of: an unwavering faith in myself. I wouldn’t trade it for a first draft of a novel or Billy Joel’s fingers, and certainly not for a cold beer or a glass of wine.

Contributing Factor #3 to My Alcohol-Free Success: I Feel so Damn Good

I have, in previous writings, enumerated all the ways in which my abstinence from alcohol has benefited me. I won’t bore you all with them again. But I will say, unequivocally, that I can’t remember when I last felt such a profound sense of physical, emotional, and mental well-being.

And again, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

So What About That Bathroom?

Thanks for asking, reader. We completed it in about three weeks, and I may be biased, but I think it looks pretty tight. We went with a sleek pear-green paintboard tile for halfway up the wall, a complementary shade of paint above that, and a toilet that doesn’t leak. It’s not perfect, but the occasional skewed tile or smudges of grout on the walls don’t bother me. They’re only a reminder of the handiwork that my husband and I completed together, with a minimum of marital discord and, for my part, not a drop of alcohol.

We have two other bathrooms to tackle. Our timeline is loose; weirdly, now that the kids are back in school, my free time seems to have evaporated. But there’s no rush. We’re confident we can do the work, when the time comes.

And if that time happens to be somewhere in 2021, when technically I “can” drink? Let’s just say that while I’m not ready to make any official declarations about that yet, if you were to ask me today, I would tell you that I don’t see why I would.

Because what I’ve learned this year, besides how to grout and backbutter and spackle, it’s that if I can renovate a bathroom without drinking, I can probably do a whole bunch of other things without drinking.

Or just that I can do a whole bunch of other things.

Full stop.

Disclaimer: The suggestions I make in this article are based only upon my experience. I am not a medical professional, addictions counsellor, or licensed therapist. If you are concerned about your drinking, please consider the following resources for help:

If you’re struggling to quit drinking, you’re not alone.

If you’re ready to try something different, try my alcohol experiment. Do whatever it takes to stay sober for 30 days: go to your doctor, try Smart or AA or Hip Sobriety or Soberistas. Read beautiful hangover. Listen to Recovery Elevator and SHAIR podcasts. If you think it could work, try Moderation Management.

Help in Canada and help in the US:

There is a whole community of people just waiting to help you. Reach out. Something better is waiting for you.