Construction and Reconstruction

Is it just me, or do these look like little connected tumors?

They are tearing up our bathroom floor. Again.

While I recline, letting my latest incisions mend together, our contractor is hunched over our newly-tiled floor, chiseling off the tiles like scraping bubble gum off the undersides of church pews.

This whole thing started when I was recuperating from the mastectomy. I do not recuperate gracefully. I am either flat out, or I am getting better.  And getting better is usually indicated by my starting to clean. Depending on the illness, the cleaning can be as simple as sweeping the floors or as ambitious as rearranging a closet. However, I am in the big time now and I started seeing huge things that needed changing, and fixing, and improving. The most annoying (and allegedly the most easy) of which was the kitchen faucet. The faucet had been broken and leaking for years, and we periodically had to bail our cleaning products underneath the sink out from their swamp of overflow water.

We had used a contractor named Dave to do some repairs to my mom's condo, and we liked our working relationship with him. I think it was sometime about a week after my first surgery that I woke up one day with a "this aggression will not stand, man" attitude, and said we needed to call him and fix the sink once and for all.

So Dave comes out with his plumber guy, Memo, and they look around.  We start a bunch of blue sky talk about the ultimate remodel -- the bathroom, the kitchen, the exterior. But first, we just need to fix the sink. Which they do, and it's all reasonable... except that it comes with the inevitable good news/bad news: the sink is now fixed but our pipes (original to our 1951 vintage house) are crummy and corroded and need re-doing as well.

So we make a plan: do a copper repiping while we're on our soon-to-be-aborted trip to Seattle, and start on a little bit of the bathroom remodel. Remember this part from that whole story?  We come back and the house is in upheaval and we are down to the studs and it's all a mess.

Fast forward. The work on the bathroom continues, but more things come up. Our drains (not to be confused with the piping) are clogged and corroded and not to code. One of them does a neat little jog from the washing machine inside the garage, through a pipe outside the house (that people like to sit on during parties, no bueno), back under the kitchen sink (where the laundry water rises like a murky apparition every time we do laundry, which is bad if we're doing something like defrosting food or, you know, just standing there with guests we are trying to impress). So... drains.  We do those too.  Just a few thou more and, hey, in for a dime etc.

Fast forward some more. We pick out some cool flooring tile -- hexagonal white tile with a cute black pattern woven into it.  That informs the tiling -- how about white subway tile with a black pencil line. Cool.  I had originally thought we'd keep our tiling, but no, we nuke it. While we're at it, do we want to keep our tub?  First I think no, then I think yes. We could reglaze, or we could get a new tub.  Fun.  New tub.  Let's do that.  The first tub Dave picks out is cast iron and the right size, but too shallow.  Can't do that.  Need more water, not less. Then Dave picks out a good cast iron tub, deep. But, it's super expensive. And not that narrow. But that's OK and I'm about to pull the trigger when Dave says, hey, for the price of the cast iron tub, we can put in an acrylic whirlpool  Deep, narrow, with jets. Say... that sounds good. So we do that.

All is good, but it's wearing on the nerves. Our toiletries are in the office. Our dirty laundry is in the office. Everything is in the office, except for the dog. The dog does not stay in the office, nor in the house. In fact, the dog keeps getting out altogether. He gets out during the drain project. He gets out during the tiling project. He gets out through the gate that people forget to check.  He gets out when no one is looking. 

Sam planning his next escape

This is bad. Our dog... well, everyone knows Sam.  Like the rug (again, with the Lebowski reference), he ties the whole family together. So, Sam can't get out.  But he gets out.

The final straw comes last weekend. I am exhausted, stressed, and my mom generously gives us a night at the Langham hotel as a belated birthday present so I can R&R before my reconstructive surgery on Tuesday. I go over there first and have a lovely time by the pool while Roger checks in on the house to make sure everything is buttoned up before the workmen go home for the weekend. These are new workmen, just finishing up the floor, as Dave has to be out of town on family business. Dave swears they are good tile guys, fast, and will get the job done. We absolutely have to have a working bathroom by my surgery.

I sit poolside, happy as can be. I come back to the room and call a girlfriend and while we are yakking and laughing about home improvement projects, Roger comes in. "You don't know the half of it," he mutters. And, after I hang up, he proceeds to tell me what just transpired.

The workmen have put the floor tile on wrong. Like, completely wrong. The tile looks like it'd be a  really pretty simple a pattern to follow.  But you kind of have to pay attention. And if you don't... it is really easy to screw it up.  And when you screw it up, it looks really really bad. He shows me a picture of what it looked like and yes, it is, it's really bad.  The lines of tile go straight... until they don't.  There is nice spacing between the rows, until there isn't. He was trying to tell them what the problem was (with them not understanding what he was saying and indicating that it was all fine) when his phone rings.  It's the neighbor, up the street.  Is our dog named Sam?

This is when the shit hits the fan. The workmen have let the dog out through the front door this time, the floor is a disaster, they are pushing back, tempers flare. Roger kicks them out of the house, calls Memo, who comes over, and confirms that yes, indeed, it's all wrong.  And then Roger proceeds to come over to the Langham where we have a complete reality shift, relaxing and luxuriating, until we have to go back to real life altogether too soon.

Construction and reconstruction. Upheaval and calm. While on our one day vacation, I was able to get a bike ride in... a good ride, an exhilarating ride.  And I got some yoga in. And some Tai Chi.  And a lot of swimming.  And it was great. I felt bursting with health, the chemo finally letting go of its death grip on me, and I feel great.

48 hours later, I'm cut open, muscles slashed, new body parts added, and other body parts rearranged. Fat is extracted from my belly and deposited under my arm where they took the lymph nodes out. My body is filled with anesthesia. I start a regimen of pain killers which mess up brain, bowels, and basic equilibrium.

One day I'm fine, pedaling down Lake Avenue with the wind in my (well, admittedly still very short) hair.  The next day I'm a patient again, in the gown, the needle trying to find the vein, being rearranged from the inside out.

The floor is being torn up. Again. My body is being torn up. Again. We are getting rid of clogged drains, and tumors, and installing clean new infrastructures that will provide healthy sustenance for years to come. This is an expensive and time consuming process. Changing things from the inside out. Plumbing (and replumbing) the depths.

And it's not over. Not by a long shot.  But when it's done, my internal and external worlds will have been completely overhauled. Quality of life will be better. We will be set up for the next several decades, if all goes well.  Sometimes change comes in subtle shifts, sometimes all at once.  Apparently this is the year for everything to shift radically.