Life in a Construction Zone
At least I have a kitchen sink
The lease on our apartment ran out last week. Too cheap to renew, my husband and I decided to move back into our half-finished house.
It’s... alright.
The drywall is up. The walls are insulated. The joists were all repaired. The floors might not be flat, but they’re continuous with no holes. We have electricity and running water.
In a way, we’re lucky that it’s an old house. To build a floor back then, people would just lay wooden planks over the joists and call it a day. “Subfloor”? What’s that? Those planks were the floor. Then they would be finished, then re-finished, then patched and re-re-finished, all the way until someone put carpet over them a few decades ago.
Which I then ripped up, intending to cover the ancient floor boards later with vinyl plank flooring.
…Planks which are currently still in a pile of boxes in the living room.
So here we are, walking around in house slippers instead.
The kitchen is done (ish). Cabinets are in, countertops are in. The fridge is plugged in. We have electricity and running water and yes, a kitchen sink.
It’s everything else that’s missing.
No finished floor (I’m still leveling out the subfloor.) No stove (I won’t bring it up from the basement until the floor is done). No dishwasher (same reason). No knobs on the cabinet doors (bottom of the priority list). But we have electricity, a kettle, a rice cooker, a microwave, and an Instant Pot. We’ll manage.
As mentioned, the first floor’s subfloor had once been used as a floor. I found bits of the old finished subfloor underneath the kitchen tile. Sometime in the 50s, the homeowners put down oak hardwood everywhere but the kitchen. 70 years and however many re-finishes later, it’s showing its age. They’re beautiful in some spots, but the many spots that are not beautiful make them overall unsalvageable. But that’s ok; vinyl planks are easy to remove. If some future inhabitant wants to give it a shot, a floating vinyl floor rips up in an afternoon.
During demo, I found lots of mouse nests in the walls. Over one hundred and twenty-five years of history will do that to a house. One day in, say, 1928, a mouse finds its way into the kitchen wall, builds a nest, then abandons it. Another day in 1968, a different mouse finds its way to the living room ceiling, builds a nest, then abandons it. And so on. Pretty soon every ceiling, every wall, and every room has at least one nest somewhere.
I was, of course, too lazy to mask off the floors at the time. Why bother? I was covering it all up with vinyl anyway.
After smacking the plaster with a giant metal spatula, it would all come raining down on the not-flat floors in a sizzling shower. Pieces of grey plaster from the McKinley administration mixed with brown mouse droppings mixed with tan nesting material mixed with black soot from the old gaslighting system.
The floors were certainly swept and mopped several times during the past year of renovation. But, you know, not a super deep clean. Not a get-on-hands-and-knees-scrub, anime-running-with-a-rag-on-the-floor kind of clean.
The night before the movers were scheduled to arrive, I frantically mopped as many rooms as I could. I recalled everything those floors had seen in the last year of renovation.
The mopping and scrubbing continued after we’d moved in. One pass turned into two, turned into three. At first I used my trusty Fabuloso floor cleaner, but the acidity of the stuff left my hands dry, cracked, and bleeding. The green apple fragrance, once beloved, irritated my nose from breathing it in day and night. I switched to a different floor cleaner, one that I’d used many years ago. One that was basic and marketed specifically for wood floors.
Scrubbing the oak floors and smelling the familiar almond scent transported me back to a different house. A brief stint renting an off-campus house for a semester in college. A house that also had ancient, beat-up oak floors, also from the mid-century. Also full of mold.
(And, come to think of it, probably also full of mouse nests in the walls.)
So here I sit, at a makeshift desk in the living room, legs crossed on my chair above house slippers that I kicked off while seated. Staring at the primed walls whose paint is still in cans on the floor. A stack of 50 boxes of vinyl plank flooring, piled up to table height and used as a dumping ground for my tools. A 44-lb bag of tile mortar for the shower upstairs.
All protected from dust by a makeshift air purifier that my husband made of house filters taped to a box fan. (He triumphantly dubbed it The Blowhard™.)1
At least it’s warm, the lights work, and the water is clean. Soon all these supplies will come out of their packaging, and we’ll have a finished home.
...Eventually.
Further reading:
I hear echos of myself here.