Don't start that renovation (you'll never really finish it)

When your Saturday begins at 6am with the sound of a jackhammer and, after three weeks, you still have to shower under the cold stream of a garden hose, it's difficult to see the upside of home renovations.

Even Channel Nine's The Block – which is sponsored by hardware store Mitre 10, a company that presumably wants to encourage viewers to see home renovations as a desirable way of life – doesn't exactly paint a rosy picture. Contestants perennially struggle to stay on budget, complete things on time, and sometimes even find within themselves the ability to be pleasant to one another. To renovate is to suffer.

Our obsession with these shows is not just a form of schadenfreude – taking joy in others' pain as they confront the tough choice between their favourite bathroom tiles and their second favourite, less expensive, bathroom tiles.

Such shows as The Block and House Rules paradoxically inspire homeowners to renovate. After the shows air, find-a-tradie website Oneflare.com notices a huge increase in demand for bathroom renovations, demolitions, patio paving, or tiling, depending on what kind of DIY projects were undertaken in the most recent episode. Somehow the petty squabbling and financial disasters the contestants face is not a deterrent.

It's easy to see how the idea of home renovations might appeal on the surface. It seems like a good way to construct a house that's perfect for your lifestyle, your tastes, and your comfort. Plus, property is expensive and for many people, home ownership is their main form of financial security. Why not invest in that?

Because there's a catch. In order to pursue your dream home, you have to go through a nightmarish process. Like many of my millennial peers, I grew up inside a renovation/house. I, and those like me, have seen renovation timelines blow out from a few months to a decade. In that decade, your house itself becomes an unfinished project, a place to see fault and room for improvement rather than feel at home in. Parts of it become completely unusable.

The adults – the actual instigators of the renovations – have it worse. When they aren't working to pay off their home loan, they're working on their home itself. They are planning, budgeting, rearranging, procuring council permits, tiling, resurfacing, painting, and so on. The whole house becomes a pressure chamber of frayed nerves from the pervasive sounds of manual labour.

Even when the bulk of it is done, it can take years for those final touches to ever be attended to. Some surfaces never get painted, the wardrobe doors might not get put in, the prize painting may never be mounted. These little details niggle at you enough to induce the discomfort of unfinished business, but somehow there's never enough time or motivation to get it all done. A renovation is never really over.