It’s Spring of 2009 and we just closed on our fixer-upper, only 2 miles from my work. Since we had recently refinanced our existing mortgage into a HELOC with interest only payments, it wasn’t hard to secure a mortgage for the new primary residence despite the mortgage fiasco going on at that time. We knew the house would need a thorough clean out and cleanup before moving in, and we planned on a full renovation later. Unfortunately, during inspections and prior to closing, the dishwasher sprung a leak that soaked the kitchen floor, so now we had to gut and renovate the kitchen before moving in. We figured this might take a month or so. Talk about optimism! I was working a full time job and between commuting and office time, I was already tied up for at least 60 hours a week, not counting family commitments.

Time for demolition! A good friend of mine agreed to come up and help since smashing stuff with sledgehammers seemed like a lot of fun. In practice, once we started bashing cabinets, it was fun, scary, disturbing, ecstatic, surreal… not sure how many other feelings passed, but bash the shit outta those late 1960s cabinets and counters we did! They certainly don’t make them like that anymore (usually)! The cabinets were constructed of three-quarter and half inch plywood covered by a wet bed tile counter top, and did NOT want to come apart! Hours later, we had finally beat them into submission, moved all the bits and pieces to the rolloff container outside, and shoveled up the larger debris.

The planned kitchen renovation included removing a structural wall between the kitchen and living room. I knew not to mess with the wall structure, but removing the drywall would help see everything we needed to reroute that may be passing through the wall, so on to smashing drywall! Too bad this wasn’t ordinary drywall. I don’t know much about 1960s construction (other than to have EVERYTHING tested for asbestos, which we did), but it appeared to be drywall covered by a layer of thin plaster with a metal mesh inside of it. Much like the kitchen cabinets and tiled countertops, demo of this also sucked. It was about this moment that the overall scale of what we were doing started to hit me. My wife realized this and decided to snap the photo that leads this blog entry. That’s me, staring at mess we had just created, and wondering what the **** was I doing??! I had performed demolition on a house before, but this was the first time for major demo on a house with my name on the mortgage.

On to removing the kitchen floor, all four of them! Yay, more suck! The top two layers were ceramic tile floors. Beneath that was a sheet vinyl floor, and finally under that, the original tile floor. Beneath all those layers was a layer of thin, still (unbelievably) very wet plywood on top of the plank sub-floor. If you’ve never tried prying thin, wet plywood off a sub-floor, it sucks. Its like trying to pry a sheet of rubber off the floor, and it had been nailed about every 12 inches… one out of five stars, would not recommend! Again, shovel, sweep, and drag all the debris in trash bins to the rolloff. Yay, major demo was done, and it only took two solid weekends!

With most of the demo work done, it was time to get an engineer and contractor on board for removing the wall separating the kitchen and living room. Thankfully, in my line of work, I knew a structural engineer that was kind enough to put together appropriate plans, free-of-charge. Also thankfully, my friend that was helping with the demo knew a contractor that was experienced in structural construction and could remove the wall and install a new laminated beam to support the ceiling. This contractor could also help with the kitchen rebuild, and considering how exhausted we were already, sounded like a great idea!

After meeting with the contractor and going over our big list of ideas for the new place, we were sold on increasing the amount of work the contractor would help us with. Our pre-move-in list grew to include new exterior and interior doors, replacing two windows, and a remodel of the full bathroom. We could wait until after the move in to renovate the half bath in the basement, but the full bath remodel before our move-in really made sense considering the logistics of 4 people trying to get clean each day… without a shower… ewwww!

Over the next couple of weeks, my wife and I visited kitchen showrooms to come up with a new kitchen layout and ordered cabinets. We also ordered the new doors along with flooring for the main level of the house. I sprinkled in a couple more days of clearing out belongings from the previous owners and cleaning up our demo work in the kitchen area to prep for the remodel.

While my contractor started work on removing the structural wall and installing the laminate beam, our attention turned to the basement. And what a disgusting basement it was! The ceiling was an older discolored drop ceiling, the walls a thick wood paneling that looked like a 5-year old slapped on whatever hideous paint was available in the discount bin, and the thick pile carpet was a beautiful green, somewhere between the colors of grass and pea soup with discolorations of dirt throughout. It reeked of must with a hint of urine. It was obvious the carpet had to come out before we could move in, but it wasn’t just the carpet…

In tearing out the carpet, my buddy had noted staining on the ceiling and was concerned that I initially considered keeping the drop ceiling in place. While the Mrs and I thought we might replace a tile or two as needed and keep most of it until we were ready for a full remodel, my friend pointed out that a few of the tiles had what looked like moisture stains. Hmm… that’s odd… there’s no water on this side of the house. We began tapping the few affected tiles with hammers and they began crumbling apart and falling to the ground. As the tiles quickly started breaking out almost like falling dominos, what I estimated on the order of hundreds of mouse droppings came falling down with the tiles and an overwhelming urine odor soon overtook us! We stood there dumb-founded while choking back the urge to vomit.

And so, another huge add-on to our ever growing to-do list. Clearly, the entire basement would need to be gutted and sanitized before I could even consider moving in, and over the next couple of weekends, this is exactly what we did. After wrecking a couple Tyvek suits, a few gallons of bleach, and a shop vac, the basement was clear for renovation. Unfortunately, my wallet and timeline were starting to run short.

As the contractor was putting our new kitchen together, we had found a tenant for our ‘old’ house. The agreed move-in date was still weeks off, but I talked to my contractor and got them up to speed on what we wanted our revised schedule to look like. While there was still a lot of work to be done, we were assured it wouldn’t be a problem… except it was, and we needed to wrap up quickly!

While their crew had been working at our house about one or two days per week throughout the process, I knew more would be needed to meet our deadline. Despite pushing for more time, we didn’t get it. Besides schedule concerns, we started having quality issues. Rewinding to the structural beam install in the kitchen, I remembered the owner/foreman wanted to cut a notch in the bottom of the laminated beam that would support the ceiling joists, but this is a huge no-no with laminated beams as it compromises the strength of the beam. Thankfully, both I and one of his employees with more experience was able to stop that plan and suggested a means to eliminate the interference in the attic, saving the beam integrity. Moving to the bathroom remodel, once the contractor said it was complete, I checked it out and there was grout all over the new jacuzzi tub and inside the toilet. When I asked about this, I was told it would wash out easily after a few uses. Too bad we didn’t find out until after moving in that this was NOT true at all! Inspecting the tile work in the tub surround, the tiles in the corners looked like they were broken with a chisel and hammer, so clearly the blade they used was either very dull or the wrong type for that tile. Checking the install of the dual sinks, I noticed the drains weren’t sloped properly. When I asked the contractor about this, I was told it would be fine, that the drains were close to level and everything would drain properly (also, not true). The kitchen floor they had installed was only done properly at my insistence of leaving 1/2-inch clearance around the perimeter. The contractor fought me on this and wanted to install flooring no more than 1/8-inch from the walls, which would have caused the floor to buckle after a few humid days of summer.

As the end of July came and my new tenant’s August 1 move-in day approached, my frustration boiled over. We were less than a week from moving in, but only half of the interior doors had been installed and not a single one was trimmed, only 1/2 of the kitchen cabinets were installed, the island had been secured to the floor off-center from the plans, and all the issues noted above with the bathroom remained. I called and fired my contractor, and let him know he wouldn’t be receiving payment for his last week of work since I needed to hire someone to fix their mistakes in the bathroom and kitchen. And I still needed a place to live in a week.

I took a few days off work to get most of the kitchen cabinets finished and get a couple more doors installed. My wife bounced between helping me with that and trying to scrub grout out of the tub while her parents drove 2 hours each way to watch our kids. As you’d imagine, move-in day was somewhat stressful. While it was exciting to be moving along with our financial improvement plans, I was moving my family from a 4-year old, 2100-square foot colonial to a complete wreck of a renovation project, and the looks on my friends faces as they helped us move in let me know they all saw the same thing.

There were two very important things I heard during that first week in our new house that stuck with me to this day:

• A family member looking around the house and then at me with a worried face, saying “this is really bad”, and
• My daughter asking me “where’s the library here”?

Knowing how bad the house was at that move-in time couldn’t be over-stated. Our kitchen had a few cabinets still stacked in the corner, a sheet of plywood on the island cabinet was our countertop, a two-burner hot plate and toaster oven served as a stove, and one of our bathroom sinks (upstairs and to the left) doubled as our kitchen sink. The basement, which was supposed to be our family room, was completely gutted and now being used to temporarily store our boxed belongings. And not having the basement available meant we went from our 2100-square foot mini-McMansion to about 1000 square feet of usable living space. My wife had been working until midnight on the evening before our move so the kids could at least move into freshly painted bedrooms. Oh, it was bad, but it strengthened my resolve more than ever to right the ship as fast as possible. I would work harder that coming year than I ever have in my life, and my kids would be there to witness it all.

As for my daughter’s question, it made me realize the semi-charmed life I started bringing my kids into, and I felt some relief in knowing I was pulling the silver spoon back out of their mouths. While every parent would love to give their child “the best”, doing so with a focus on material goods can lead to a sense of entitlement and a lack of appreciation for the difficulty of working for and earning what you get. I wanted them to understand the differences between bare minimum and luxuries. More than giving my kids the best that I could afford if I worked 70 hours a week, I wanted my kids to have plenty of time and love from both parents while also understanding hard work, sacrifice, and the strength and character building that only comes from being uncomfortable.

Yes, things may have looked bad, but they were already getting better.