Many hands make light work
Another doozy of a weekend.
By midmorning Saturday, the house had already been stripped of any illusions about how the next couple of days were going to go. My mom and dad had been in town for less than fifteen minutes before tools were out and work had started. The original plan was modest: a laundry room and pantry refresh - scrape wallpaper, paint and prime, add shelves, redo the pantry closet. We scraped wallpaper for about ten minutes before agreeing that the drywall it was attached to had to go.
So the hammers and breaker bars came out, and within a few hours we had pulled drywall, tar paper, and old insulation, sprayed and cleaned the ceiling and wall bays, and were cleanly down to the studs. The theme for the weekend quickly became clear: scope creep -the unplanned expansion of the scope of work.
One very cool development during the laundry room demo was the exposure of the original siding from the original part of the house. The pantry sits in an addition built in the 1960s, and instead of any thoughtful method of connecting the structures, the addition was simply built next to the original house and drywall was attached directly to the cedar siding. It’s going to add a very cool unique backdrop for the floating pantry shelves I plan to build.
We wrapped up Saturday with a Home Depot run to stock up for a daybreak start on Sunday, then braved the single-digit icy weather to get dinner.
Bright and early Sunday, we hit problems. Batteries weren’t charging. Miscellaneous circuits ran every which way through the ceiling, to the point that it was nearly impossible to make sense of them while trying to tie into something existing. So the scope crept again: rip out the entire circuit at the panel and start over.
I’m fairly inexperienced with electrical work beyond wiring outlets and lights, but that’s all this should have been - so why did it become a whole thing? The wall where the switch for my new canless recessed lights and the outlet were supposed to go was an inch and a half thick. One 2×4, turned the skinny way. That meant shallow boxes for everything, and they were so shallow I couldn’t even fit wire nuts behind the switch and outlet. I started adding boxes just to handle junctions - constant power to the outlet, switched power to the lights, but it got hairy fast. Even as I write this, there are three shallow boxes mounted and some crude drawings laying around with schematics and brainstorms that don’t actually work. I may have to call in the big guns and post on Facebook or Reddit so strangers can tell me I’m an idiot and argue about three wrong ways to do it.
While I was staring at boxes and wires, Mom and Dad were slinging sheetrock - or so they thought. Turns out Mom likes talking about hanging drywall more than dragging around heavy sheets bigger than she is, holding them against walls that are aggressively not square, and shaving down edges and corners. The whole day was pretty tense, but a late Hattie B’s lunch helped reset morale. They even had a Super Bowl LI (the 28 - 3 game, iykyk) rerun on, which felt almost like a personal touch.
The meal also featured front-row seats to a car plowing through a fire hydrant, a walk sign light post, and a street sign. The driver (unscathed) got out, assessed the damage, hopped back in, and drove off dragging a bumper, leaving a firework show of sparks and an ear-splitting screech in his wake.
Back at the house, we did a little more just to feel good about putting in a full day, then went to Limo, an excellent Peruvian restaurant in the Fatherland district, for fried plantains, ají de gallina, and pork belly. It was over that meal that we decided to explode the scope once more. All the trim had to come down. Windows, doors, baseboards, crown molding - everything. It was in rough shape, would take more work to refinish than replace, and we didn’t even like the molding choices. So by 7 a.m. Monday, most of the trim was off and the walls were opened up yet again, exposing the crumbling lath and plaster I had just spent weeks restoring, removing, or replacing.
But if the house is going to meet my expectations, it seems no stone will be left unturned. Good luck to my sleep schedule.
As I write this, Mom and Dad are breaking down the remaining trim and gutting the bedroom closets so they, too, can be rebuilt properly. What incredibly cool parents—to fly down and dedicate three long days to the dirty grind of demo and tackling new, difficult jobs. My love for projects and my confidence in the face of the unknown almost certainly come from them. What a blessing to have had the upbringing, support system, and extra sets of hands that I have.
If you guys end up reading this, thank you and I love you.
QC
