When Renovations Make You Want To Scream: a house log
Our post on Instagram last night was admittedly a little cryptic. We were having an extra frustrating day thanks to two discouraging duplex-related blows that came flying at us rapid-fire, in the span of a mere 10 hours. We have consistently tried to share the bad and the ugly along with the good – like talking about blowing a timeline or breaking a budget (or a ceramic animal). Or when we cannot find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three distinct and spectacular ways).
Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you do not truly feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you are still in that “repeatedly screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also do not want to simply pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with plenty of glad little emojis when you literally want to use that big punching hand emoji to punch that day in the face. So the best post you can muster is an honest and semi-grouchy paragraph about how renovations are not consistently straightforward, but in the scheme of things there is still plenty to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, compact vases shaped like houses, and cookies). Note: many cookies were harmed in the making of our down-in-the-dumps evening last night.
But today is another day. Perspective typically comes after sleep (or simply after some time in general) and we are already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that is already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it is riding a sloth, but it is rolling. So we hoped to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we are renovating down the street from our pink beach house. Well, or at least TRYING to renovate.
We talked several weeks ago on our podcast (Episode #76) about some of the behind-the-scenes hurdles we had to clear before things could start moving, but those hurdles seem to simply keep multiplying. Things that were plain when we did this last year for the pink house have become surprisingly complicated. For instance, when we were ready to begin work on the pink house we were able to pull a permit and begin right away. This time around we have been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place is not getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.
The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we are proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town’s Historic Review Board has to approve them. Most of it was small and in short a non-issue (tweaks to the front porch railing and stairs, for example). The biggest change was the roofline, because we were hoping to 1) raise the pitch of it and 2) add a dormer. The roof is effectively flat now, so increasing the slope will assist it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof (rather than an pricey and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (certainly do not want people calling to say there is a leak during their beach week!) there are also hardly any other flat roofs in the historic district, so we thought they’d like that it would fit in better with the houses around it.
The dormer was truly simply for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing.
We missed the November review board meeting by a hair, and the December one was postponed due to the holiday. They are only held monthly, so yesterday, January 16th, was our first opportunity to present our changes and get approval. Our contractor Sean did the presenting for us, since he knows everyone and does this all the time (in fact, he was presenting two other projects last night along with ours). He’s a stickler for historical details and reassured us that he would never propose anything he did not expect to get approved. It is a waste of his time and ours – delaying us both another month until we can re-propose it.
So imagine all of our collective shock when our plans got rejected. That is right, we waited months for this meeting and then we got turned down.
He called us after the meeting with the bad news, and we could hear in his voice that he was surprised and frustrated too. Apparently, it had seemed like they were going to vote in our favor, but in the end… denied. Sean, John, and I were also frustrated (and extremely surprised! We never saw this coming!) because there are a lot of, in our humble opinions, more egregious additions and renovations around town that sailed through the approval process.
Who knows when and how they made that happen, but it felt like ours did not even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We do not fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that is their job!) and we cannot even claim to have a ton of historic architecture knowledge – but one thing is certain: we were only attempting to do something that several other lately-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex would not assist.
So we said “Ok, Plan B – we will scrap the dormer!” But even by conceding that, we still have to wait over a month for their February 25th meeting to re-propose it. And then, assuming it is approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve simply begun imposing this year. That means that we will not have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Nearly April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five-month delay fairly much makes you feel like you are taking crazy pills.
The whole no dormer thing makes us sad, but we can let it go. Sure it would’ve been cute, but it also brought in to our cost (so we are killing two birds here!) and if the cutest thing the duplex has going for it in the end is a little dormer on the roof, whelp, we have bigger problems. So we are trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we will get to make, both inside and out. Plus Plan B, which is a slightly less pitched roof without the dormer, sort of like this (pardon my bad iPhone coloring job) is still fairly charming – and we have every reason to believe it’ll sail through the approval process because they mentioned they’d favor that option in the meeting yesterday.
It’ll look approximately 58 times more adorable and lovely because we are also widening the stairs, making the pillars more substantial/historically accurate (as well as the railing), going with white siding with mint green shutters, and restoring those lovely diamond grilled windows in the top middle of the house. And the whole board has no issue with any of that. So unless we are living in some sort of alternate reality (is this The Bad Place? You know we enjoy this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and at last get down to business in late March/early April. It is simply hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.
We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was simply a truly (truly truly) high quote from a subcontractor that we did not expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s strong! we in fact used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we did not expect to be making, so the whole day sort of felt like a bad duplex omen from the start. It was like I was in that scene from Entrapment where Catherine Zeta Jones weaves her latex-covered body through a maze of lasers, except picture me in Minion footie pajamas tripping around and getting all caught up in blown deadlines and budget-breaking estimates.
This stuff certainly happens, and it is not that we did not expect it. We expect curveballs. But we have not even began yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall nor a single foam ceiling tile has been took out. And considering we simply spent the last year fixing up a house that is ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it simply caught us off guard. But there is that excellent quote by Veronica Dearly that I am keeping in mind these days. Because folks, it is totally true:
You can do hard things (but only after you’ve totally freaked out about them. Once you’ve done that you should be fine.)
Whelp, the good news is that we should be fine, because last night we officially freaked out. HA! It felt remarkably like when we could not find the beach house’s water meter for a month. Except add a bunch of other months to that. And kill off a cute little dormer (R.I.P. Norma The Dormer – best said with a Boston accent). But today we are back on track. Even better, we are on a mission. We are following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we are in right now – and already have some calls in to a few distinct people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we in fact get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it is gonna be FAIRLY FREAKING STRONG. We are so excited about all the plans and ideas we have baking for this duplex project of ours.
In closing, I will say that while it is never lively to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it simply felt like it would not have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background was not happening (or that it was not affecting us). Because we are humans. Humans who, as it turns out, can eat a remarkable number of cookies while mourning a dormer and a woefully busted timeline.
