Wait.. is this real? Am I actually LIVING in our dream home?? Or am I only dreaming that this 2 1/2 year long process has finally come to an end?
It’s 8:11 in the morning and we are just getting ready to sit down and take breakfast when my wife sleepily declares, “There’s a man at our back door…”
I turn around to see a thin man leaning over a pile of cut plywood and buckets, peering into our 8 foot tall glass. Confused, I scramble to slip on the “stair shoes” required to exit our finished kitchen space and enter the dusty construction zone that is our stairs. I open the tower door that exits onto the back patio and see there is a second, much larger man lurking at the bottom of the steps.
Is this the start to a horror movie? It certainly could be… but for today, it’s just another example of what it’s like to live in a construction site.
“We’re here to fix your counter,” the skinny man proudly exclaims.
“Oh… we weren’t expecting anyone today,” I respond, while mentally re-calibrating my expectations for the morning. “Let me put our dog up so you can come in.”
You see, even though we moved into our new home on October 19th, over 2 months past the original completion date, it still isn’t done. Unfortunately, we could not delay the move any longer, because we had already rented out our old place, and they had nowhere else to go. Thus, we found ourselves living in this beautiful, unfinished home filled with boxes, high stress levels, and chaos.
Our absolutely stunning 15 foot long kitchen island with a waterfall edge, just installed last month, developed a noticeable crevice at the corner where the mitered waterfall edge begins. I was grateful to have this addressed quickly, despite the slight annoyance of being surprised by contractors at our private rear entry during breakfast.
The guy was cheery and chatty, and unnecessarily loud for so early in the morning. My wife hadn’t even had a cup of tea yet, and she’s normally still asleep at this time. Without even thinking about it, I interrupted his banter, put my left pointer finger to my lips, and with a descending volume instructed him, “SHHHhhhhh… it’s still morning time,” while slowly lowering my flat right hand from my ears to my shoulders, in case he couldn’t hear me over his own talking.
“Oh, sorry. We should be done in about an hour. There will be some noise, and it will smell like a nail salon for a bit because of the adhesive,” he explained, when I asked how long this would take.
At that, Bethany had to hurriedly leave the room in order to avoid crossing the hair-thin threshold of frustration that comes after surviving the new build process. The man apologized 5 times, after I explained that we are exhausted and lack any patience due to our extremely elevated stress levels.
It wasn’t his fault that the communication broke down. He was just told earlier that morning that this was his assignment for today, and he was just doing his job. For us, it was just one more thing that we didn’t have the energy to handle with our normal grace under fire.
We are in the home stretch. We ARE living here now. The reward of being able to enjoy daily life in our gorgeous kitchen (despite everything else still looking like a tornado hit), helps immensely in dealing with all the remaining stressors. Someday- very soon- the construction will be over, and we will simply be living here, happily ever after, for the rest of our lives. That day cannot come soon enough.
Travel Grrrls 