You have no clue what a mountain climb a renovation is. It’s definitely one of those life choices when you truly do not know the extent of what you are really going to do. A renovation is not predictable, at least ours hasn’t been.
If you’re living in it, even part of it, it’s even more difficult. Renovating an old home is like playing with a cactus.
Here are a few things I wish someone had shared with us before we got started:
Anything you want to keep or reuse needs to be removed from the premises. Nothing is sacred to the workers. (And I really did love the guys working on our home–but they were on a mission to fix and build, not take care of my -what we call in the South-pretties.)
Whatever you leave on the walls or shelves or anywhere else-unprotected-is fair game. If it’s not smothered and covered with moving blankets or plastic, they will not think twice about setting anything down on it be it a heavy, scratchy tool, or a sticky cup of tobacco spit. (Remember, I do live in Mississippi.)
If you don’t want it to be damaged, remove it.
Before the renovation there was a coffee bar off from the kitchen in the corner of the keeping room. I had a brand new coffee mug hanger that I regrettably left mounted to the wall. The workers used it to hang tools, the rubber caps on the end of many of its pegs came off and were lost forever.
Don’t leave one single thing in any drawer, cabinet, or shelf. It didn’t occur to us that the under stairs pantry cabinet would be affected by the foundation work. We thought leaving baskets of packaged food and canned goods would be ok to stay. Wrong. In the first couple of days after the foundation guys got to work, they discovered rot under a supporting nearby wall and we had to climb in and form an assembly line to get a bunch of food out of the area.
Expect dirt and dust everywhere.
If you don’t want dust on it, remove it or seal it up-twice. Since the top shelf of a closet wasn’t being torn out, I never thought anything left way up there would be a problem. Wrong. Dust everywhere. Dust on top of dust on top of dust.
Off from our kitchen is what we suspect used to be a porch on a concrete slab. At some point that became a laundry room, cleaning closet, and another space that we intend on being a pantry. We had put a temporary metal shelf with baskets of pantry items in that space and didn’t seal that room off. Once we moved back into the home, I had to take every single thing off the shelf for cleaning.
When you think you’ve cleaned it all up, get ready to clean it again. When we had drywalled, dusted, then painted, and then installed most of our floors, I loved how clean the house finally felt. I thought we were done with dust. Wrong, so very, very wrong! With every installation, trim, cabinets, tile—dust, and more –and more–dust.
(Imagine vacuuming glitter from a future party at your beautiful home. You didn’t really want to see another picture of actual dirt from my home, did you?)
There will be mess. Just when you think you can finally get the dumpster out of the yard because you’re done with trash, you’re not. Once everything that needed to be demo’d was done, I thought we wouldn’t need a dumpster anymore. Since then, we’ve installed floors, tile, and a bathroom vanity and mirror. More and more trash. Our city trash collector used to pick up the neat piles I left about every other week by our trash can, but the last two pickups they’ve ignored the stacked and broken down cardboard tile packaging. They finally had enough, I guess.
There will be casualties. Our hundred year old French doors’ panes were accidentally broken by workers. The freshly painted walls got smeared with dirty hands installing electrical outlets, and dented by heavy ladders leaned against them.
The fresh drywall was cut in wrong places-once, when trying to find an outlet that the drywall workers covered up, and again when trying to find a place to tie in electrical to the kitchen island. (Thankfully, my husband is good at drywall repair.) In my attic office space, drywall was torn off the wall to gain much needed access to electrical wires. The holes cut for a bathroom vent fan were mis-measured and there we have another need for drywall repair.
My husband broke his hand during this process and stepped on a nail.
The workers cut the power to our deep freeze and I discovered their mistake by the smell several days later. Total loss.
My favorite coat was ripped when I brushed up against a nail sticking out of old kitchen trim and my favorite $5 thrift store find ever, a super soft luxury brand fleece jacket, got irremovable spray foam on it when we had a major cold snap and went around frantically filling in gaps. I could go on…
Prepare to adjust your budget.
I lost count of how many times we had to adjust our budget-because of our inexperience, because of unexpected expenses, needing tools since we were doing as much as we could ourselves, and because of adjusting expectations to accommodate a moving target. Getting the guy who shows up, does meticulous work, and checks back to make sure all is well costs more, but we decided is worth it. Deciding this is likely the forever home and putting in tile instead of fiberglass inserts in the bathroom-not necessary-but worth it…to us.
When having our back door installed, a discovery that the wall with a window beside the door wasn’t evened secured to the beam, led us to decide to remove the window and the one in the laundry room beside it because we’d planned on their removal later. The exterior part of that wall included a dryer vent funneling lint inside a false wall which was dangerous, and unnecessary. More time, more materials, more money.
As I write, our renovation still isn’t finished and I’m still not sure I would choose to do it again. Like most difficult things we encounter, if we could turn the clock back, we say we wouldn’t choose the same again, but we humans aren’t wise enough to see the goodness that comes out of the dust, the dirt, the mess, the broken. We rarely get the mountaintops, so we need to find joy in the climb up to that brief view before we do it all over again in some other realm.
Shane and our youngest were brave enough to cross the bridge at Grandfather Mountain, NC a few years ago. I’m not that brave, but enjoyed the view where I stood. I’m trying to do that today wherever I am, with whatever level of bravery and hope I possess in that moment. I hope you will too.
Read here about a time I considered going way out of my comfort zone and the growth I experienced even without making that choice.
Plant life in your home and heart, Andrea