I posted some more pictures from our adventures in Texas earlier this week. I totally need one of those writing chairs. I promise it would allow me to post only the best electronic prose to this forum. I would have added more pictures I not so sneakily took from my iPhone but the upgrade to 2.0.2 trashed my phone so I lost all my notes and photos from a corrupt backup file. No more running Christmas list and no more pictures of 16th century globes or Edgar Allan Poe’s writing desk.

This has been an incredibly long week, one that I’m not even sure when it started. I spent nearly all of Saturday working only to get on a plane for Texas on Sunday. Wednesday started at 3:30am local time in order to make our 5:30am flight back home. That whacked out my entire sleep schedule. Given the timeline of this week the house has gone completely to seed and is littered with dirty cereal bowls, tumbleweeds of dog hair and boxes of books. I’m hiding in the office in front of the computer because if I look around the house at all that needs packing/cleaning/sorting I may just sit in the floor wringing my hands.

We would hire someone to pack our home for us except that a) it costs approximately $856,742 and b) I don’t want other people “messing in my goodies.” My mother is perhaps the queen of shooing others away from her goodies and has remarked that someone throwing away her belongings was the only unforgivable act in her eyes. As my mother’s daughter, I can’t imagine someone coming into our house and packing the nine Splenda packets in front of my keyboard to carry to our new home nor can I imagine someone else deciding they were disposable. Perhaps I should get my mother to pack my medicine cabinet, dishes and piles of knick-knacks since she is the one I can trust the most with all these treasures amongst trash.

The new house is basically done except that we have to put the bath fixtures back after the vinyl flooring was installed and call about two transition strips from the hardwood to vinyl downstairs. Our tentative plan is to move next week over Labor Day weekend. To be optimistic about it, I suppose moving gives an opportunity to take stock of one’s life and decide what is really important or not, Splenda packets and all.

Oh, and it’s not just you. Rich snickers every time my mother or I talk about messing in our goodies.

Things that take less time than our 10+ week home renovation project.

• Tidewater Community College’s Summer Session (5/19-7/29/2008)
• My parents’ engagement (10/31-11/26/1967)
• Growing a new fingernail
• Sailing around the world (~50 days at fastest pace)
• Growing tomatoes from seedling to fruit 
• The Neapolitan War (3/15-5/20/1815)
• Typical American maternity leave
• The Summer 2008 Olympic Games (8/6-8/24/2008)
• The D-Day battles of World War II (6/6-8/25/1944)
• The 2008 Tour de France (7/5-7/27/2008)

No, they’re still not done.  I e-mailed the contractor a three page “punch list” of items left to be done on Sunday night.  He claims they will be done on Thursday but we don’t believe him (they did absolutely no work on Monday).  We signed the paperwork (and paid our 30% deposit) on the evening of May 27, 2008 and the contract was supposed to be completed by July 25, 2008.

There were many things I thought I wouldn’t be doing until after the house was finished.  First it was ALA (June 28), then BlogHer (July 18-19), then the conference I’m attending in New York this week.  Every time I’ve gone for a hair cut, doctor’s appointment or to get my nails done I’ve thought, “the next time I’m here we’ll be in the new house.”  My hair is getting embarrassingly multi-colored, partially because I hoped I could report that our house is done for those two hours Joseph is coloring and cutting my coif.  

I try to not script things in my life.  I don’t want to paint a picture of what my August or September will be like, because if for some reason it’s not like that I’ll be disappointed. My father has quipped several times that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” in an attempt to be positive about this huge project we’ve taken on. And I admit in my research for the list above, I found a few things that took quite a while to finish. Michelangelo’s statue of David took three years to complete. It takes five to seven months to hike the entire Appalachian Trail (which only about 25% of those who attempt finish). And Rich and my relationship has blossomed over ten years to where we are now (he and his ex were guests at my wedding to Jeremy, ironically).

So perhaps instead of trying to guess where I will be in X number of days I should just be happy with where I am now.

No the house is still not done. They did take the 30 foot dumpster out of the front yard yesterday, though, so that definitely adds to curb appeal.  The house has been under construction for nine weeks as of today.  When we went by the house they were putting the finishing plaster downstairs and had primed some of the rooms upstairs for paint.  Unfortunately, the contractor came through and marked all the parts of the walls that needed finishing work and shortly thereafter the painters came in and covered all those marks with primer paint.  The left hand official has no idea what the right hand is doing.

We met with a real estate agent from Rose & Womble today to talk about managing the house we’re in now as a rental once we move. That went fairly well and I’m optimistic about that whole process. Here’s hoping we can get it rented before too far into fall, but I’d just be happy to get the damn workers out of our new house so we can start enjoying it instead of just making large mortgage payments on it.

I had overdraft protection kick in on our bank account earlier this week. We’re officially living paycheck to paycheck at the moment until we can get the old house rented and the new house settled. I haven’t lived paycheck to paycheck since I was sharing a bank account with Jeremy (coincidence?). This is wearing me down because I’d like to afford carpet and refinished floors and maybe a few moving boxes and food for the next few months and I feel like we’re not spinning wheels or wasting time. I’m just tired. I’m out of charity, patience, time and cash for the contractors and I’m ready to just move and get someone else in our old house so we can move on with our lives. We can’t even call the flooring people to fix the den yet because they haven’t finished painting and plastering in that room. I really do need a bumper sticker or t-shirt that says “I can’t. I have contractors.”

The contractors supposedly owe us $100 for every day since last Friday that the house is not done. I told them that I didn’t want them to suddenly send 50 Mexicans to my house because they were only going to do 10 times the damage that the five Mexicans have been doing to my home. But I don’t feel like they are making our house a priority. Perhaps they will end up owing us money by the time they’re done with everything.

They came last week to install sheetrock in the utility room last Wednesday. My father called me around 6pm and sounded very sheepish on the phone. Apparently he had been still fixing the ceiling joists in that room (they weren’t level) and was prepping to install the pull-down attic stairs. The only English speaking person on the job told him they would come back the next day to do the ceiling. When the heavens opened up and my father had to go patch the roof jack hole the plumber still hadn’t done, he ended up soaked to the bone. He decided to go home and get some food and dry clothes. When he came back an hour later the Mexicans had torn down his stabilizing boards and put up three sheets of drywall in the ceiling – the exact thing they said they weren’t going to do until the next day. So my father lost his temper and tore out all the drywall from the ceiling with his bare hands while yelling at the sheetrock dudes. They don’t speak English, but I think they got the drift that they shouldn’t have installed that. I think my father worried I would be mad at him, but I’m just sorry I missed the whole show. Rich and I imagine Godzilla noises as we think about my 6’3″ father throwing drywall around amongst the 5’7″ workers. I ended up staying until 11pm that night to help my father install the attic stairs.

So at this point I’m just tired of these jokers in our house. I’m canceling change orders left and right and we’re doing as much of the work ourselves just to keep them from doing it three times and making us furious in the process.

And even though money is tight right now, I’m going to get a massage tomorrow evening to have my favorite masseuse stand on my shoulder blades until she gets this huge knot out of them. I’ve been using heating pads and creams and stretching every way I can imagine, but I think I’m just out of luck until tomorrow. Maybe without this rock under my skin, I’ll have a better attitude about everything. Tomorrow is payday after all. But right now everything seems so close and yet so far.

No, we’re still not done with the house, but thanks for asking.

We have reached the part of construction where nearly nothing gets done and what does get done is about 75% wrong. I haven’t been posting many updates about it because honestly it’s a little depressing.

In the first week of this project my father and I butted heads a bit. I was trying to let the contractors do their thing and he was following them around for everything with an intensity usually reserved for invading other countries. But as time moved on, I realized that while Dad is a bit rough around the edges, he’s usually right about the construction things.

About two weeks ago on the day after the HVAC guys had installed out air handler, our contractor Bill called me to tell me my father had to leave the construction site because he was causing trouble for everyone. I laid into that poor contractor with a fury and earnest that startled him to say the least. Bill picked the absolute wrong time to tell me my father wasn’t being helpful.

The night before this phone call we had discovered that the HVAC installers that we had met with and coached on exactly where to install the air handler, duct work and registers had failed to follow simple instructions. They had put the air handler all but in the middle of our walk-in closet and commandeered all of our paltry attic space for their giant distribution box. They also had used two different returns so that our house will have three different air filter sizes when they’re done. Their final act of defiance was to make a half-assed attempt to drill for the refrigerant lines and get a 12″ screwdriver completely wedged in the floor joists. That was when they called it a day and went home. High fives all around.

My father and I debated all the possible scenarios for how to fix the air handler until about 1am. And then he sent me home and stayed until 4:30am removing their screwdriver from the floor and cutting the space for our HVAC lines. He even left a light on under the house so it would be obvious the holes went through to the crawlspace.

Bill later told me that I have a bright future in cross examination because I let him finish his side of the story and then I went through all my points on how he was wrong and my father was the only one who gave a damn about doing this job right and that none of their workers have done a single thing well despite constant supervision. And I only said motherfuckers once. Miraculously, all the things on our list are getting fixed.

So I’m trying to get over things being wrong like the missing nails in our headers the fact that our porch leaned to the left or that their second attempt at a dormer in the guest room looks like a fun house. I’m just trying to focus on the bright side that we’re catching these things before they’re done and Bill is straightforward enough to fix them. But I wonder if they’ll ever make any money off of this job if they have to keep taking things apart and putting them together again. Maybe the third dormer attempt is the charm.

Rich and I have said we feel like we’re all standing out on the pitchers mound in Bull Durham where everyone lists off their problems. The plumber is a sensitive soul who can’t take a joke and gets fretful about my father, the electrician is depressed because his wife has been sick, and Bill has had lady-friend troubles and is overwhelmed by the workload. I told my father that we don’t give to charity, we just hire wayward contractors. I hear candlesticks make a nice gift.

At one point I was mildly annoyed that not much progress was happening on our renovations. Now I get anxious from the moment someone picks up a hammer or saw in the house until they sweep up and leave. I won’t even let them keep a key to get in the house at the moment because I don’t trust them to do what the plans designate without adult supervision.

When we got to the house today and they were tearing out the walls in Barry’s room with great intensity, I couldn’t even be on the same floor and had to retreat upstairs. Every swing of the sledge hammer made me grimace that they were about to send something important into or through something else important. Thankfully, both Rich and my father were there to supervise. As they started sawing through the support beam in Barry’s room, I was both terrified and insatiably curious.

Today went okay but we refused to let them touch the dormers until we have a parley with our project manager Bill about the entire situation. I felt like typing up my own version of a stop work order and hanging it on the dormers but thought that might be counter-productive.

After the dust and plaster settled (they were SHOVELING plaster off of our carpet – they’re determined to force us to buy new carpet), I was able to go back and look at everything and feel much more calm. I took my photos, marveled at our clever ideas for where to run the HVAC refrigerant lines and which walls to change, and then headed to the beach.

Putting my feet in the sand and watching the sun set at the end of my street helped me put it all in perspective. I should hang copies of these photos around the house while it’s under construction to help keep my blood pressure down.