So now I guess I have a house…
Ten days after closing on my new house, Nashville iced over.
Not a light dusting of snow or a “stay inside if you can” situation, but a full sheet of ice over everything. Power out. Heat out. Tree branches snapping and falling across the city, taking out homes, cars, power lines, etc. Tree branches came down all over the property, but somehow nothing major was damaged. That felt like luck rather than planning. At least one semi got guillotined by a falling highway sign, which feels like an appropriate summary for the weekend.
The house was already being torn apart as I took out sections of the crumbling plaster and rotted windows, but now it was dark, cold, and silent. No power to charge tools. No heat, so it was too cold to prime, paint, or skim coat. No electricity to vacuum for dust control (thank goodness for the $300-a-day rental air scrubber I’d picked up about 12 hours before it became useless). Destroyed ceilings, exposed framing, and a coating of black dirt, dust, and grime from the turn of the century (two ago).
The “rose” for the weekend was a nice little visit from my friends on their snow-day stroll around the neighborhood. They showed up bundled in scarves and coats, stopping by to check in. I answered the door looking like a cartoon coal miner, but they played it off and offered their desperately needed help emptying out the attic. What followed was essentially a fire brigade, hauling out roughly two cubic yards of accumulated junk: cases of eyelash extensions, MC Hammer CDs, random doors from different decades, all being passed hand over hand out to the back porch where it currently sits in a large, ice-coated, frozen mass. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it made an immediate, visible difference, so shout-out Malört House and the 510+ crew.
This weekend was the first time everything started to feel genuinely scary overwhelming. On top of the fact that I couldn’t do any damage to the to-do list, the day laborer I’d enlisted for support took the money I paid up front and has stalled in every imaginable way to avoid doing any work so far, which is its own kind of lesson learned. Between that and the weather, progress slowed to a crawl. The city was in chaos, the house was unusable, and every constraint stacked on top of the others. No power meant no tools. No heat meant no finish work. No ability to clean meant no safe way to keep demo going. Everything I wanted to do was blocked by something I couldn’t control.
For now, it’s a holding pattern, working on the small stuff where I can still make some progress. Waiting for the ice to melt, the power to come back, and the temperature to climb enough that materials behave like materials again. The house is still standing. Nothing critical was damaged. I’m still moving forward, just in a much less linear way than planned. Now it’s about getting through a moment where everything feels suspended, cold, and unfinished - and trusting that momentum comes back once the lights turn on.
QC
