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Mervi
A somewhat similar story as that told about Sanna and Kalevi can be told
about Mervi, who also wanted but had been unable to accomplish a renovation
project. When she had moved into her rented two-room apartment in 2000,
Mervi had removed a plastic wall-to-wall carpet from the floors because the
apartment looked “scrappy”.
M: when I moved here, this was so messy that I was, like, I cannot look
at these kinds of carpets for one moment, so I rolled them away right
away and painted the floor. (Mervi 04 73-75)
Mervi painted the bare concrete floors white and wallpapered the walls and was
pleased with the result. However, the apartment went on the market in 2002
and her landlord demanded that she replace the old plastic carpets because the
bare, white concrete floors would have decreased the apartment’s value. At the
time of the first interview in 2004, it had been three years since that incident,
but Mervi had not yet mustered enough strength to take the carpets away, even
though she found them irritating and they clashed with her professional interior
and furniture designer’s taste.
3 D E S I G N E N T E R S H O M E
117
M: I can’t stand these [plastic carpets]. I mean I won’t stand them, like
(pause) like at all. It is a huge effort in a rented flat. It was because
these floors were so awful but now I have to live with it because I was,
like, I would have been sued because I had ruined this flat. And I had
to roll the carpets back. There is concrete, painted white, underneath.
But it is just (pause) when this flat was sold, if this flat hadn’t been
sold, [the concrete floors] would still be here, but it was sold and I was
in the situation where I had to roll them back. And they are awful.
(Mervi 05 285-292)
Mervi is one of those rare households in the sample who had not invested time
or money into renovation work and Mervi did not talk about crafting or tuning
projects either. It appeared that she put most of her effort into her professional
designing projects, and sometimes that work overflowed into the home as well.
When we met in 2005, Mervi told me that the apartment had replaced her
studio while she was without a proper studio and that she had just removed
most of her work stuff.
HP:
Quite a lot has changed here.