This Old Money Pit

I have a lengthy list of half finished projects at my house that unfortunately reached a point beyond my minimal skills. Our home’s previous owner would have forged ahead, and apparently did so on many occasions, leaving us with poorly constructed shelves, walls and storage areas that have soured me on the prospect of unskilled labor working in my home. No one is more unskilled than I, so I have a general rule which forbids me from raising a hammer.

I am not completely useless. I can handle some basics, like changing light bulbs or plunging a clogged toilet, but beyond the simplest tasks, I prefer to leave it to the professionals. Due to lack of funds or general procrastination (for which I have a true talent), our home repairs and upgrade projects have been pushed back and further down the financial priority list, always behind family vacations, but jockeying for spots somewhere between buying a new Hybrid vehicle and the Season 2 DVD set of My Name is Earl.

As time passed, we finally reached the point that we realized that we either needed to move, renovate, or find an ingenious way to burn the place down for the insurance. Being neither ingenious nor lucky, our list of options narrowed rather quickly. Moving would require not just purchasing another home, but also selling our existing one. Since our interest in moving was partially due to our fear that the house would fall down around us, I had some concern about how easy it would be to sell, and how little we would be willing to accept for salvage rights. It also became apparent, as we looked at homes for sale in our area, that we were not finding anything in our price range that was exactly what we wanted. None came close to the size of our current home, and if we found one thing that we really liked about any of them, there were always two or three things we didn’t.

Being logical to a fault, I decided that it made more sense to refinance and renovate. It took a while to convince Connie, but we both discussed that this should be a short term situation. We have eight more years of school for our youngest and then she’s off to college. Before her taillights are out of sight we will be packed and on the way out of this town. Not sure yet where we are going, but we’ve got some time to figure that out.

We’ve been in the process of renovating our home for many months now. Due to delusional planning based on some really bad advice and my own naïve notions, we are now drastically over budget and woefully behind schedule. I’ve had moments when I wondered if it would have been easier to have bulldozed the structure and started from scratch. It seems that every contractor and worker who has set foot inside the front door has commented on how “unsquare” the walls, floors and ceilings are. It got to the point that I started to take it personally. It was also an excellent excuse for everyone to charge me more money.

We’ve had the typical renovation nightmare stories: shoddy work, contractors who promised to show up on the next day and didn’t reappear for a week. Unanswered calls, missed deadlines, holes accidentally drilled through our roof. A lot of the early work has had to be redone, more than tripling many of the original cost estimates. It’s hard to maintain a Christian attitude.

We were without a kitchen for over a month. We cooked with a hot plate and a microwave. We did our dishes in a bucket sitting in our bath tub. That’s not good for the back or the morale. I do not recommend it.

Before we left on a two week vacation in October, we rebooted the entire project by hiring a general contractor. This was one of the smartest things I have ever done. He took over the hiring and firing, the scheduling, and the expectations of quality. With my involvement out of the way with the exception of writing checks, everything evolved much more smoothly, but also more costly. When we returned from vacation, our “living room, kitchen, dining room” combo had been transformed. We all compared the moment of opening the door to the “move that bus” excitement from Extreme Home Makeover. I nearly cried.

Once we had a working sink and stove, the need for completing the other work lost some of its urgency. We took a long winters nap and suddenly realized that there was still a lot to do. We planned to convert our old dining room/office/place where things got put until we found another place room into our new master bedroom. It would give us a lot more room and also have space for a walk-in closet. Connie had dreamed of a walk-in closet since we married, and I thought it would make a good place to play hide and seek until I remembered I wasn’t eight years old anymore.

A few weeks ago the great bedroom makeover began and as usual, nothing was simple. None of the four walls were “square” and neither was the floor. As the contractor tried to describe the measures that would have to be taken to fix this Salvador Dali inspired room, I could tell that his standards for quality and precision were much higher than mine. I wanted to stop him and suggest that he not worry quite so much about perfection, because although I could certainly see what he was talking about now that he had pointed it out, I had lived in this house for 16 years and didn’t notice or care that our walls were out of alignment. Couldn’t we just throw up some drywall and paint? This really shouldn’t take more than a day, should it?

I didn’t say anything for a couple of reasons. One, I didn’t want to sound like an idiot. I have learned that I appear much smarter if I just keep my mouth closed and nod. Second, I did want the work to be done right. We’d come too far and spent too much to go cheap now. “In for a penny, in for a metric ton,” I always say.

We’ll hopefully be in our new bedroom in two weeks. That’s after multiple days of drywall mudding, sanding and re-applying. Then painting and drying and re-applying. The floor has to be put down and the molding and lights installed. I don’t know what else there will be, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have thought of it on my own and it will be absolutely essential to the successful completion of the project. Whatever it is, it will cost money.

In my original fairy tale estimate, I had scheduled two days for the work on the bedroom, with an equally ridiculously small amount of money set aside to pay for it. It’s become brutally obvious that although I am fairly good at planning within the scope of work that I am accustomed to, I am a miserable failure at renovation budget and scheduling. I guess it’s appropriate that I have found a career working within the broken structure of the government, where budgets are drawn in crayon and checks can be written without ever having to look at a bank balance.

I suppose that the outside of the house can wait, as I make another hat in hand visit to the wishing well. I have tried to convince a few bankers not to worry about the amount of the money needed. In our new economy, equity is over-rated. Besides, if I can’t pay it back, my kids, grandkids or great-grandkids will do it. Isn't that the American way?