Monday Day 21

Most people who know about the remodel want to know the duration of the project. When I say, "4 months", I get, "Oh but you ALWAYS have to double that estimate". And this is helpful to me...how precisely?

Irony aside, I appreciate the sympathy and commiserations about the stress. However, other than the disaster that was averted, it has been a relatively stress free project. A few weeks ago, I heard Ed Emmet and a panel talk about stress. The judge said that Hurricane Ike in itself wasn’t stressful because he had the advantage of a book about 6 inches thick that laid out a plan for almost every contingency that could happen. (Incidentally, the judge assured me that he canceled hurricane season this year).

We tend to think of stress as being detrimental but in itself, stress is just a sense of pressures that we face. I suspect part of my approach has to do with having survived a PhD program which was akin to having the Sword of Damocles overhead.
("Does not Dionysius seem to have made it sufficiently clear that there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms?")

The remodel is truly out of my hands. Instead, I have an extremely competent, capable and experienced builder(who appears to have an unending supply of patience to my questions) with an equally competent crew of craftsmen, contractors and their crew of experienced men. In effect, I have a playbook for the remodel that I’m not responsible for executing it. Knowing that someone else knows what he needs to do and when he’s got to do it in order to pull this whole thing off is a tremendous help.

I realized exactly how experienced and competent my builder and his framer were after that whole design fiasco when they worked out alternatives even before the engineer confirmed their ideas.

Today, when I got to the house at 4pm, they had already extended the front of the second story 3 feet, and covered the roof. The little bit they need to complete requires more material. By the time I left, almost an hour later, they had completed the roofline over the extended gameroom.

They already put siding on 2/3s of the garage and put tyvek on the third wall, having already framed the new larger door and the window.

I need a hardhat. Something is bound to fall on my head but I just can't help being captivated by the progress. It's like fast forwarding a movie. It's like magic.