Renovation Blues
by Robine Andrau
The old maple has been cut down. Halloween is approaching. My house renovation is about to begin. "Plenty of time," P says. He talks excavator this, foundation guy that. "We'll be all set to frame before the freeze," he says. And I believe. Have my fourteen years of marriage to an architect/builder taught me nothing?
In November P's crew demolishes the deck, the shed, and the structure sheltering the steps and entrance to the cellar. It's happening, I think. They'll be back tomorrow or the day after. I am sure of it. But nobody comes. The cold air blows through the splintered rotten cellar door. The furnace is wheezing and chugging, working overtime.
Then the snow begins and the inches pile up. It's pretty to look at, but how safe is it for snow to clothe the sump pump and its electrical cord? I check the batteries in the smoke alarm, make sure my fire insurance is paid up, practice crawling under an imaginary layer of smoke (I am, after all, an employee of the National Fire Protection Association). When I insist, P builds a shaky, doll-size lean-to over the electrical outlet.
We wait for the weather to change. It does. The Alberta clipper with its frigid winds and subzero temperature roars down from Canada. For ages (well, for week and a half, or so) we are in for it. Our nostrils freeze closed with each breath. Our words hang in the air like icicles. The mice sew jackets from ragbag rags and huddle under the clanking radiators, too cold to steal food from the cat's dish. In the kitchen the water pipes to the washing machine freeze, so we can't wash the sheets, but it doesn't matter since, with our nostrils frozen shut, we can't smell whether they are fresh or not. And the icy wind blows through the leaky outside door, spreads through the cellar, and sweeps up the stairs.
Then comes the January thaw. I return home to the sound of splashing water. A spring gushes out from under the stove, floods the kitchen, and streams into the dining room. I try to shut off the valves under the sink. Wrong valves. The water keeps gushing. I sprint for the cellar and enter a rain forest. Water soaks through the kitchen floor, the subfloor, and the pink insulation. It's raining in the cellar. I stand on a shaky garden chair trying another valve. Hands too cold. Need a tool. Wrench is in the flooded kitchen. Stop. Call the plumber. He's sick in bed with the flu. Can't reach my daughters. Can't reach my sons-in-law. Get the wrench. Can't feel my icy wet feet. Back to the cellar. Try the main water valve. Can't budge it. Back upstairs. Finally I call P. And he comes. My savior! (But also, indirectly, probably the cause of the problem.)
Later, when the water is mopped up, I return to the cellar. The water dripping off the insulation has begun to freeze. Pink icicles hang down like stalactites. What have I gotten myself into? Work hasn't even begun yet, and I already have my doubts about the project. Maybe this is the low point. It will get better. I wait for spring.
In March the excavator, like a lumbering prehistoric creature, tears up the driveway with its giant treads and begins digging. After a week of rain, the trench becomes a moat. The water is too muddy to see the crocodiles, but I'm sure they are there. The footings are poured in April and framing of the addition begins. It's not so bad, I think, as long as they stay in the new part of the house. But, of course, they don't. I pack everything up room by room and retreat upstairs with all my stuff. And then destruction begins in earnest as they break through from the addition. They gut the downstairs. Plaster and insulation dust fouls the air like smog. For the next few months I live like a refugee. Picture this:
A woman d'un certain âge (polite for "over the hill," as my French teacher Miss Rhodes told us) makes her way gingerly past the eye-high boxes lining the upstairs corridor. The top box in one stack serves as her "pantry," where she keeps a jar of honey, a jar of peanut butter, a box of cold cereal, some crackers and cookies. She glances in the second bedroom. It is stuffed with all her belongings: her computer, writing desk, antique bench, every book she owns, boxes and boxes of kitchen equipment and dishes—accumulations of a lifetime. She shakes some dry food into the cat's dish, then takes her flashlight and descends. At the bottom of the stairs, she pushes aside the plastic shroud that curtains off the upstairs.
There's no electricity downstairs. Also, no kitchen. She switches on her flashlight and gropes her way in the dark to the refrigerator, past boxes that contain the new cabinets she ordered months earlier. The fridge's life support system snakes across the floor in a tangle of extension cords coming from the cellar. The downstairs is unrecognizable. It is the domain of the "others"—the carpenters, insulators, plasterers, plumbers, electricians. They start work at 7:30 a.m., walk in and out at will, move their equipment around, blast their radios. Like a patient on the operating table, the house lies open and vulnerable as the "others" hack and stitch, pound and replace.
It'll be beautiful when it's done, everyone assures the woman. But all she does is shake her head as she takes the bread out of the fridge and creeps back upstairs to make her sandwich. She eats it propped up on her bed as she reads her book. Her bedroom, too, is packed with her belongings. It is her everything room now. The radio plays Beethoven softly. It's week Number 8 without a stove. She longs for a cup of tea.
There are, of course, many more bumps in the road—the new fridge doesn't fit in the space made for it, old pipes can't be moved, doors open the wrong way, rugs (which were stored in the cellar) are ruined when the sump pump quits and the cellar floods, the bed is broken. I'm beyond being fazed. I'm numb. I endure. Finally, in November, I move downstairs into my palatial new quarters. Everything is "too"—too high, too big, too new, too much, too expensive. Slowly, though, I begin to expand into the new "too" space.
It's a year later now, and I've pretty much recovered from the renovation blues, but I still shake my head sometimes and wonder how this all happened. After all, all I really wanted was a bathroom downstairs.
Copyright Robine Andrau