Bathroom Renovation - Day 4

YO, PANDORA!
There’s a whole lot of conferring going on in that bathroom. Not much hammering. This is because, as always seems to be the case with every house I live in and every remodeling project I undertake, it has been discovered that whoever did the work on this room before made senseless decisions about important structural matters.

This doesn’t only happen with remodeling (which I do scant little of for this very reason). It happens with every home repair job. Every time I go to a new haircutter. And every time I go to a new dentist. No one likes anyone’s previous work.

Once my handyman had to rebuild my back porch steps and he spent a good deal of time explaining what a bad job the previous step-fixer had done. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’m pretty sure it was he who had last fixed those steps.

When I first met my bathroom contractor we stood outside that useless pink room and he explained step by step how the process would go. How the process should go. I said to him, “Here’s the thing you need to know about me: I’m a nervous wreck.”

He chuckled a little when I said that, but I feel like he’s totally gotten the message. He comes to find me several times a day and gently tells me why there are nails poking through my kitchen ceiling, how he himself will open up the kitchen wall so they can access the plumbing, how they plan on reinforcing the joists so that there won’t be any danger of the main staircase falling apart. All good news. But all procedures that had not originally been deemed necessary when he first bid the job.

When I was pregnant with my first child, we lived in a small three-story row house that didn’t have a level floor in its midst. It was falling apart everywhere and when we talked to a contractor about renovating the third floor to make it habitable for a baby, my husband and I decided to take the path of least resistance. We moved.

I’m really looking forward to having a new, usable bathroom. But I think the real work going on here is mine.

I’m making my peace with Pandora, yo.