What we’ve realized as we renovate our beloved S.F. dwelling

My old friend Amanda was having work done on her home in the Catskills. She called me one evening, almost in tears. There was lumber all over. She was microwaving dinner in the bathroom. But then came her epiphany: “Sometimes, Kevin, you need to make a big mess so you can straighten up your life.”

In 1926, Calvin Coolidge was the president of the United States. On Nov. 11, 1926, a highway known as Route 66 opened for business. Had Silent Cal gotten into the presidential limo that year and driven along the Main Street of America, he might have found himself in the Golden State. Had he gone farther north, he might have discovered that on the southern border of San Francisco, in a tract of land that would one day be known as the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior, some builders had been caught up in the bungalow frenzy.

The word “bungalow” comes from the word “bungaloue,” shelters quickly built in India, done in the style of the Bengali. When building vacation cottages on the English seacoast in 1869, a clever marketer appropriated the term “bungalow” to give them an exotic feel. It stuck.

The word came to mean a small home, generally a single story with a sloping roof, and was the darling of the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century.

Yes, in 1926, the Bedlam Blue Bungalow was built. It wasn’t blue then. And the bedlam had not yet moved in. The dining room had gumwood cabinets, the chimney worked and somewhere along the line, they added a bedroom and the porch got closed in.

But for the most part, it sat quietly on a corner until almost the end of the 20th century, when it was invaded by Fisher-Paulsons. And our bedlam.

At first there were only two of us: my husband, Brian, and me. And the dogs: In 23 years Miss Grrrl, Diva, Wolfcub, Qp, Krypto, Buddyboy, Bandit and Queenie have all lived here. Somewhere during that dynasty, two human boys adopted the pack, Zane and Aidan.

Early in our tenancy around 1999, there was a fire. A roofer had let a spark get caught in the fly space. Do you know what they used for insulation in 1926? newspapers. Maybe even The Chronicle. And those old periodicals flamed up, and firefighters came in and flooded our little home.

By that time the gumwood had more than 70 years to dry, and so every board in the room warped under those hoses. We fixed the windows, replaced the cabinets, and some very nice men sanded the floors. They had to rub down pretty far to get it even, but they did and the Fisher-Paulsons lived happily, well, if not ever after, at least temporarily.

Which brings us back to the dogs.

Truth of the matter is that all dogs urinate. Some more than others. Old Krypto, you couldn’t walk him past a vertical surface without him raising a leg.

And male dogs can be competitive. If Buddyboy urinated on my recliner, then Bandit had to urinate just a little bit higher. And poor crypto. He had to stand on his tiptoes (tip-paws?) to urinate higher than that.

We didn’t notice all at once, but one day we saw that the two decades worth of hounds had eroded a moat around my La-Z-Boy. There was almost no oak left. They couldn’t repair it, only replace it.

So last week we moved our dining room table out, our Stickley chairs, our bookcases, our piano, and hired people to rip up the 96-year-old floor. Down to the studs.

For two weeks, we have no television. We have to go through the yard to get to the kitchen. Our sons’ rooms are on the other side of the construction, and they live as strangers, stumbling into the kitchen only for the 12 minutes it takes to eat ravioli and snarl, before going back to their rooms and electronic devices.

Dogs urinate physically, whereas teenage boys urinate psychically. They are all marking their territory. We are, to coin a phrase, bungaloathing each other.

But Aunt Amanda is right. We had to make this mess, to spend this time in separate parts of the house, so that we know how much we belong together. Two weeks from now, we can move the table back in, gather in the dining room, hold hands, say grace and be truly grateful that we live together in this old bungalow.

With all its bedlam.

Kevin Fisher-Paulson’s column appears Wednesdays in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com