On Your Mark, Get Set,

Ann Taintor never fails to elicit the truth. . . or a smile. Her work here.

Go!:

It’s not that we lack news to relate. It’s that I’m struggling how to put into words what needs to be said without putting it in print on the internet. It’s taken me 2 weeks to stop being dumfounded!

Let’s just say, for now anyhow*, that IZ is our new General contractor. He’s doing a bang up job of it, despite the fact that the budget is now 14K lighter than it should have been! He’s lined up amazing people to put our home back together again and the tradespeople we’ve been working with have been so compassionate about our circumstances.

There will be sacrifices. Like the real potential that not everything will be done on our hotel vacate date (10/25). And some of our finishes are, well, maybe not quite what we had imagined going into the process. I’m sure we’ll continue to tally up the damage done to our jobs and businesses by being out of our home for nearly 3 months.

But, y’all have seen the before photos?! It could be cheap vinyl on the floor and be better than what was in the space before! And the upside is that our electrical will no longer be a fire hazard. (say goodbye Knob and Tube) Our plumbing will be legal and, at least theoretically because plumbing has a way of misbehaving, flowing properly. We’ll have a REAL tub in the master bath.

A REAL TUB. And not any tub. . . a gorgeous claw foot thing that is heavier than heck and has to come up a flight of stairs. I’m already wondering what I can do to soften the blow for our construction crew that will have to haul that thing up to the top floor. Cupcakes? Latte runs? Vodka? Ok, maybe not the vodka!

So, this is it. The plumber arrives tomorrow morning. The electrician is scheduled for Wednesday. All our finishes are chosen and most are ordered. And now we make a mad dash in the last two weeks to finish a project that started July 1 and promptly stalled for two months. I really shouldn’t be surprised by this, since procrastination is a state of mind this family inhabits. But just the same, I’m bracing myself for all the work to be done in the next two weeks.

Oh, and did I mention I’m changing the color palette of 90% of the house. Uh. . . hang on, it’s about to get BUSY up in here.

* for those of you who have heard part of the story, I’d really appreciate it if we kept the details out of the comments. I’m happy to share our experience off-line, but it’s probably best to keep it there. Thank you! 😀