#gonna go freak out over windex next

[gardenerian]

i said this to my partner and he looked at me like i had two heads, so i’m gonna try it out on all of you: in terms of like. instant gratification, i firmly believe there’s nothing better than stainless steel cleaner like muaaaahhh chef’s fuckin kiss

#i didn’t say it like that aldjsk #that would have been deserving of the look he gave me #i can’t SEE the looks yall are giving me #so i’m assuming you’re all nodding enthusiastically #this is adulthood huh #excited about cleaners #i was MAD when we moved in bc i didn’t want to have to worry about keeping it shiny #but MAN is it fun to make it shiny #anyways. #gonna go freak out over windex next #maybe pledge #MOTHER EFFIN SCRUBBING BUBBLESSSSS??? #can you tell i have company coming #i go full *WE CANT LET PEOPLE KNOW WE SITTTT* #okay bye akdjsk

[raspberryparker]

someday | one

college!au spidey x fem!reader

← previous | series masterlist | next → word count: 4,818 summary: peter is suffering and failing english. that’s it, that’s the plot. warnings: see masterlist (graphic-ish description of injuries) read it on ao3 add yourself to my taglist!

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   There was nothing Peter could do about the fact that his brain was literally decaying.

   Okay, not literally. He may have had a headache, but he was pretty sure that his brain wasn’t actually rotting. God, he could almost hear Professor Williams correcting him on the use of the word. How insufferable.

   But that was just more proof, further evidence to back up his (very poor) argument. He couldn’t even use words correctly; how could anyone expect him to pass English? There were so many more important things he could have been focusing on.

   Like the fact that that he had finally kind of gotten used to the head rush that came with sitting cross-legged on his ceiling for five hours. He’d been steadily increasing the time he spent up there aimlessly scrolling through his Twitter feed, trying to see how long he could last. It was his own personal experiment of sorts—Peter was a scientist, after all. He had hypothesized that he could only last about three hours at most. But to his surprise he’d managed to go a solid four and a half before he gave out and threw up all over the floor of his dorm, though not before falling into it. His room reeked of bleach and Windex for a week. And after days of hard work and the sheer power of his unrelenting stubbornness, he’d finally managed to go the full five and walk away from it with little more than a headache and seeing a few spots. He wasn’t sure what he could do with this information but he was more than ready to find out.

   Those were the kinds of things that occupied the space in Peter’s mind. That and an innumerable amount of calculus formulas and chemical compounds and on and on and on. If he just started writing all the information he stored in that little Parker brain of his, he’d fill an entire collection of encyclopedias without even trying. Now, with that in mind (feel free to groan at that awful joke), did it seem reasonable that he should pay any attention to try and compare two completely different plays from an era that should no longer concern anyone in this day and age on their employment of dramatic irony?

   If one were as sane as Peter—although he could almost guarantee his sanity was diminishing by the day—they would undoubtedly agree with him when he said absolutely not. But frankly, it wasn’t up to him.

   And so that was how Ned found him: cross-legged on the ceiling, with his back against the wall above his bed, his face as bright as a ripe tomato and with a worried expression that seemed to be carved in stone. But he had every right to freak out. He was failing English.

   “You know, that’s not gonna help.”

   Ned dropped his bag on the floor next to the spot on the carpet that was whiter than the rest, and then fell back onto Peter’s bed with a soft grunt, folding his arms under the pillow behind his head and gazing up at his best friend’s face about a foot above him.

   “Nothing helps,” Peter groaned, unfolding his legs and stretching them out along the ceiling, the rough surface catching softly on the denim. “You know, I’ve come to think that maybe ending it all might be my only option.”

   “Oh yeah, you could do that,” Ned mused, feigning deep thought. “But then who’d take over for the one and only web-slinger?”

   “God, I hate it when you have a point.”

   As if he actually considered it, even for a second. If there was anything more unbearable to Peter than trying to write about anything even remotely related to his English course, it was the thought of not being around to be the friendly neighbourhood super hero he’d promised to be. He had a city to protect. But it was also a long running joke between them that Peter would one day swing up high over the streets of New York and then neglect to catch himself on the way down. He couldn’t remember when it started.

   Peter stood then, stepping a few paces to his left in order to drop off the ceiling without landing on Ned, and with a quick flip he was on the proper side of the world where the normal people were. His head throbbed, all the warmth that had gathered there beginning to flow back down to where it was supposed to be and the pressure behind his eyes subsiding. He glanced at Ned, who had closed his eyes and looked rather peaceful on Peter’s unmade, messy sheets.

   “So have you thought about what you’re actually gonna do?” he questioned.

   Peter sighed. “Nothing. That’s what I’m gonna do.”

   Ned sat up then, looking at him incredulously as if he’d just told him that there were vines sprouting from his ears. “Dude, you gotta do something.”

   “Says who?”

   “Says the school. You know English is mandatory, right? They won’t let you enroll next semester if you don’t pass.”

   “So I’ve been told.”

   Peter peeked at the clock on the small desk across the room, and though it was almost completely obscured by loose papers and notebooks that he never thought to put away, he still saw the bright green block numbers displaying the time. 4:43 PM. Nearly time to go.

   As he rummaged through his school bag looking for the new prototype webbing cartridges he’d designed, he felt Ned’s gaze on him from the way the hairs at the base of his neck stood on end. The feeling that Ned wanted to say something but couldn’t bring himself to was making the air around Peter palpable. He felt the tension on his skin, eyes nearly watering at the way it stung the inside of his nostrils and he detested the way it made his mouth feel like it was stuffed with cotton balls. Though his heightened senses saved him from getting killed on a nearly daily basis, they always seemed to act up at really, really inopportune moments. Such as this one.

   He felt Ned’s words before he heard them.

   “Do you need help?”

   Peter frowned, his brows coming together. “What, like a tutor?”

   “Yeah, or something like that,” Ned replied. “I’m asking because I know someone, you know, if you ever manage to swallow your pride and accept the fact that you can’t get out of this by yourself.”

   “Ouch.”

   “I believe this is what the kids call ‘tough love’.”

   Ned looked at him for a long time. Now that he was right side up it was easy to pinpoint all the warning signs that there was something terribly wrong. The bags under Peter’s eyes had always been there; those dark crescent moons etched into the creases there by many nights spent swinging through the streets of the bustling city, stopping crime whenever it had the audacity to crop up, had become a permanent feature on his face. But there was something else, something far more concerning in the way his shoulders stayed perpetually close to his ears, an undeniable tension tugging his entire frame upward as if he was being pulled up by a tight string.

   And when he turned to face Ned once more, the crease between his brows that had been there since he’d been sitting on the ceiling was still present, if not more prominent. He was only nineteen, but Peter was going to end up with wrinkles soon if he didn’t stop frowning all the damn time.

   “I’m worried about you.”

   His expression softened, his features relaxing at his friend’s words. “I know.”

   “You look like shit,” Ned continued, though his tone held the same care.

   “I know.”

   “You’re so frustrating.”

  Peter smiled, plucking the mask of his suit off his desk and flipping it so it was facing the right way again, hiding the circuits and wires that lined nearly the entirety of the fabric. He brushed his arm across the desk, clearing space and knocking papers, books, pencils, rolls of solder and even a sock to the floor in the process. If looking at him wasn’t proof enough that something had been troubling him, then one only needed to step into the catastrophe that was his dorm. But to be fair, did anyone keep their dorm sparkling? He didn’t think so. He fished the red and blue suit out of the top right corner of his small closet and smoothed it over the area he’d cleared of clutter. Ned watched as he carefully slipped the cartridges into their holders at the hip.

   “I’m serious though,” he pressed on, not missing the way Peter’s ears twitched in annoyance. “I’ve got a friend who could help you.”

   “I barely have money to buy food, Ned,” Peter sighed. “I seriously doubt I’d be able to afford a tutor.”

   “She owes me a favour anyway. She wouldn’t make you pay.”

   He turned back to face Ned, eyebrows raised. “What makes you think she’d even be willing to help me?”

   “Oh, please.” With a roll of his eyes, Ned reached into his back pocket and pulled out his phone, scrolling through what Peter could only assume was his contact list. “Would I even be friends with someone that cold hearted?”

   “I don’t know, last time I checked we were still friends with MJ.”

  “She’d punch you if she heard that.”

   “Countin’ on it.”

   He held up the suit by the shoulders then, the baggy material looking drab and uninteresting and frankly kind of ridiculous. Throwing it on the bed at Ned’s feet, he tugged the hem of his ESU hoodie up and over his head, his t-shirt and pants coming off shortly after. He discarded the clothes on his floor with little regard as to where they ended up. Ned moved around him as Peter tugged on the loose suit. He set up his laptop on the desk and pulled a textbook out of his backpack. This part of their routine was easy, comfortable even. It had integrated itself into their lives just as easily as everything else did.

   Peter tapped the spider emblem on his chest, sucking in a quick breath as the material of the suit formed to his body and hugged his limbs. He turned to grab the mask but found Ned already holding it out to him, a worried expression on his face.

   He took it carefully. “Thanks.”

   Ned only nodded, swivelling around in Peter’s desk chair and opening up the textbook he’d placed next to the laptop. Something was off and it was making Peter’s skin crawl more than usual. He looked carefully at the back of Ned’s head, his words only being held back by his teeth and his tight jaw. If he opened his mouth, there would be no stopping. But what the hell, right? Ned was his best friend.

   “Give her a call,” he said finally, and Ned turned to him with a smile. “If you think it’ll help, I don’t see why I shouldn’t try.”

   “I hope you know I’m doing this for your own good,” he grinned, pulling his phone out again and looking for her contact.

   “Yeah.”

   Peter would always admire just how much his best friend had matured since sophomore year. Sure he still geeked out over Star Wars and comic books (but then again, so did Peter) but there was no doubt in his mind that Ned had simply… grown. As person, as a best friend, as his guy in the chair; Ned went from nervously helping Peter with whatever ridiculous idea he’d had that week to either fully supporting him or calling him a fucking idiot when he was being one. Ned was the one person he could always count on to be there for him.

   “Hey,” he called, his foot on the windowsill and hand gripping the frame, backpack slung lazily over one shoulder. “You’re here if I need you, right?”

   Ned smiled, tucking his earbuds in and firing up the laptop. “Yeah, always.”

   Peter grinned back, slipping on the mask and throwing up a peace sign before he jumped out the window of his dorm. Luckily, his dorm only faced an alley between the residences and no one was around to see him crawling up the side of the brick.

   When he reached the rooftop, he sat for a moment admiring the autumn sunset, the warm orange hues washing the city with vibrant yet calm energy. Though he knew that this was but a mirage, and New York was nothing if not a complete disaster, he couldn’t help but think of a city at peace. Maybe one day he’d accomplish it, and hang up the webs one last time. But he doubted it’d come any time soon.

   “Pete?”

   “Yeah?”

   Ned’s voice was soft through the comm system, and Peter could almost hear the frown on his face. “Be careful, yeah?”

   Peter grinned, his heads up display focusing and zooming in on a group of men standing near the edge of Washing Square Park, a scared looking girl at their feet and trying desperately to back away on her hands. Why were they always stupid enough to assault someone in broad daylight in the middle of a park? They were almost begging for a beating.

   He webbed his backpack to a wall in the alleyway below him, then shot a web at the next roof over and pulled himself forward, landing gracefully on the balls of his feet and using the momentum to launch himself into the air. His head buzzed with the rush of air whizzing past his ears. He flipped once, twice, then landed in a crouch in front of the girl, fingertips on the ground with one arm extended to the side to help his balance, shielding her from the attackers. He could’ve sworn they could see his smirk through the mask, because their faces paled comically.

   “Always am.”

━━━━━━━━

   “Hello?”

   “Listen, you know that favour you owe me? Yeah, I’d like to cash that in now.”

   “Oh I’m great, Ned, thanks for asking. How are you?”

   “Y/N….” Ned whined, dragging out the last syllable. “It’s important.”

   Y/N laughed, switching her cell phone from her right ear to her left, and pressing it in place with her shoulder as she poured herself a cup of coffee. She finally felt that she had room to breathe now that midterms were over and she had the weekend off from work. The library staff room was warm and cozy despite the chilly November weather, so all she really wanted to do was sit down on the couch with one of the new fiction arrivals that she’d unpacked that afternoon for a good little while, but she’d been interrupted when her phone rang.

   The strong yet comfortable smell of bitter black coffee filled the small room, and she watched as the cream she poured into her mug swirled and mixed with the dark liquid. “Alright, alright. What’s up?”

   She was so positive of the fact that Ned was beaming that she would have bet everything she had on it, and when he spoke she could see his silly smile in her mind’s eye.  

   “Okay, so, you remember Peter, right?” Ned asked, and Y/N frowned as she opened the fridge door to put the cream back.

   “Haven’t met him but you’ve told me about him,” she said. “Childhood best friend or something, right?”

   “The one and only. Anyway he’s kind of in a tight spot right now.”

   “How so?”

   “He’s failing English.”

   Y/N smiled knowingly then, settling down on the rather ugly but still surprisingly soft beige couch in the centre of the room, the bright blue mug in her hands warming her to the bone. She knew instantly what the phone call was about and what Ned was going to ask of her, yet she feigned ignorance. Why? For her own amusement, she supposed. 

   “And you called me because…?”

   “You’ve been talking about wanting to tutor people on the side… right? But I figured you might want to test how comfortable you are doing it before you start charging people.”

   “And you’re suggesting that Peter would be my guinea pig?”

   “...Yes, in a way.”

   “Is he okay with that?” she asked, setting her phone down on the small foot table in front of her and putting the phone on speaker. She was all alone in the staff room, and there were only a handful of students and two other staff members in the building at the moment so she wouldn’t need to worry about disturbing anyone. That, and her neck was starting to ache.

   Ned’s sigh confirmed her suspicions, that he had somehow convinced Peter into agreeing to being tutored even though he didn’t want to. She wasn’t sure why, but Y/N felt her stomach tug at the thought. But that was ridiculous—she didn’t even know the kid.

   “I kinda had to beg him,” he admitted rather sheepishly. “He’s just… so stubborn and it- it’s infuriating. They’re not gonna let him back next semester if he doesn’t pass this time because he failed both times last year but honestly, I feel like he doesn’t even care.”

   “Hmm.” Y/N knew the type of person Peter was just from the little information Ned had just shared with her. He was headstrong and stubborn, but only made time for things he enjoyed and had genuine interest in, which evidently did not include English. “What’s he studying right now?”

   “Double major in Chemistry, and Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.”

   “Jesus. That gave me a headache.”

   “I know, gross, right? I always told him he should’ve done Com-Sci like me, and maybe he’d be less stressed, but he never listens to me. He’s actually the smartest person I know when he wants to be, but when he doesn’t…”

   “Yeah, I get it,” she sighed. “Well, I’m free all weekend if he wants to meet up at the library. I was gonna stay far away from this place since I have a few days off, but I’m afraid I can’t abandon my books for too long anyway.”

   “You have no idea how much this means to us, Y/N,” Ned sighed. “Thank you.”

   “Yeah, yeah,” she grinned, mostly to herself though since no one could see her. “I feel like this is more important to you than it is to him, though.”

   “That makes two of us. Hey, can I give him your number?”

   “Sure, go ahead. Tell him to text me, yeah?”

   “He will. And if he doesn’t, I’ll make him.”

   Y/N giggled at that, sipping on her coffee and relishing in the warmth that slid down her throat. She dreaded leaving the library and stepping into the cold autumn air. She wanted to stay holed up on that couch forever. “Alright, dude, I gotta go. I’ll never leave if I stay here any longer and I still have to read a couple chapters of a new book tonight.”

   “Yeah, for sure. I’ll see you around this week?”

   “My door’s always open for you,” she smiled, knowing that Ned’s dorm room was only a few floors below hers and he’d often pop by to visit her while she studied. “See ya.”

   “Bye, my guy.”

   Y/N wondered if everyone felt that odd silence after hanging up a phone call, that lingering stillness that felt a little too quiet, especially when she was alone. It made the skin of her arms prickle with goosebumps and she shivered, putting her things back into her backpack and tugging it onto her shoulder. Quickly knocking back the rest of her coffee, she grabbed her scarf off the hook on the wall and laid it lazily around her neck once, still too warm inside the building to put it on properly.

   As she stepped out of the staff room, the warm atmosphere of the library engulfed her once more and she smiled as she stepped toward the main desk. Carol, her boss and the school’s head librarian, was typing away at the computer and busy signing out a laptop to a student. Y/N slid behind the desk, grabbing a copy of the new book she wanted to read and began to sign it out to herself on one of the unoccupied desktops as Carol thanked the student and let him know that he needed to bring the laptop back by the following evening. When she was done, she glanced at Y/N with a smile.

   “Oh, tell me how that one is,” she said when she saw the book. “It caught my eye but I’m not sure if I’ll have time to read it. If it’s a worthwhile read, however, I’ll make time.”

   “Will do.”

   Carol was a kind woman, who looked so stereotypically like a librarian it almost made Y/N laugh when they’d met. Her greying auburn hair was always tied into a tight knot on her head, and her wire-framed glasses were always slipping too far down her nose. She wore cardigans and capris pants almost everyday, and Y/N was pretty sure she only owned one pair of beige shoes. But she was caring and sweet, never shushing anyone when they laughed too loudly or if they swore when they dropped a particularly heavy encyclopedia on their foot. She was one of the main reasons Y/N liked her job so much and never said no when Carol asked her to come in a little bit early or stay a little while longer. She was practically her second mother, and the library was her home away from home.

   “I’ll see you on Monday, dear?” Carol asked as Y/N picked up her shoulder bag.

   “No, actually,” she grinned. “I’ll see you this weekend.”

   “Oh?”

   “Yeah.” She looked at her Converse clad feet and the fraying bottom of her pant legs, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m tutoring a friend of a friend as a favour. He’s failing English and, you know me- I have an obligation to make everyone enjoy literature.”

   “You and I both,” Carol smiled, the crinkles on the outside corners of her eyes folding and making her look like a sweet grandmother (she totally was sweet, though a grandmother only to her cat’s kittens, perhaps). “I do hope you go out and enjoy yourself this weekend, though. Every time I see you, you have your nose stuck in a book. And you know I do encourage that but you should really stretch your legs, go out and have some fun.”

   “I find reading very fun,” Y/N smiled, tucking the book into her bag.

   “Oh, I’m well aware.”

   She turned, walking backwards toward the library doors so she could wave to Carol. “See you soon then!”

   “I’ll be here, as always,” Carol grinned.

   It was dark when she stepped out of the building, the cold air hitting her like a wall and chilling her to her very core. She hugged her school hoodie around herself, tugging her scarf tighter and tucking it into the collar. The only downfall of studying at Empire State was that since the campus was in the centre of Greenwich, it was spread out over quite a few blocks. It would be a fifteen minute walk back to her dorm building, even if she cut through the park. So Y/N tucked in her earbuds and set off, stuffing her hands into the soft pocket of her hoodie and trying to keep as warm as possible.

   By the time she arrived to her building on 7th Avenue, her fingers were numb as she held the keycard over the sensor. She was sure her nose looked like a cherry tomato with how cold it’d gotten on the walk. Making a mental note to buy herself a pair of mittens for the upcoming winter, she stepped into the elevator and hit the button for the sixth floor. She estimated it to be a little past 10 PM, considering her shift ended at 9:30 and she’d spent some time talking to both Ned and Carol before she left. But luckily, that meant there would be nobody in the common room.

   Setting her bag down on the couch in her floor’s common lounge area, she took out the lunch she’d forgotten to eat and sat down with her book resting on her knees and her sandwich in her lap.

   She’d spent so many nights this way, it almost became routine for her now. She nestled into her usual corner, facing the glass walls that allowed her to see out into the hallway and took a bite of her food as she turned to chapter one. She yawned, already used to feeling tired after work and figuring that a good book would help her relax.

   And relax she did.

   Y/N was unsure just how much time had passed when she woke with a start, her book clattering to the ground next to her with the movement of her body.

   “Shit,” she muttered, picking it up and making sure that no pages had bent when it hit the ground. She glanced at the clock on the wall. 4:07 AM. God, had she really been there for that long? There was a kink in her neck where it had lolled back in her sleep, and she rubbed it as she took in her surroundings. It seemed like no one had been in the room since she’d arrived.  

   It wasn’t until she looked up, however, that she really startled.

   There, in the hallway on the other side of the glass, frozen like a deer caught in headlights, stood a boy who looked like he’d been beaten within an inch of his life.

   Y/N’s breath caught in her throat as they gazed at each other, both equally shocked. It was then that she realized that it was the sound of him almost falling flat on his face, but catching himself against a wall with a sharp, pained shout before he landed that woke her up. He was still gripping the wall, knuckles white with the sheer force of his grasp, his other arm clutched around his ribs. Neither of them expected the other to be there.

   He looked like he’d been hit by a bus. Or maybe hit by a bus, but then the bus turned around and drove over him another three or four times for good measure. One of his eyes was swollen shut, the skin around and under it beaten blue and purple, and yellowing at the edges. The blood from his crooked nose dripped onto his mouth and chin, down his neck and staining the collar of his t-shirt, which had some ridiculous math pun on it that Y/N would have rolled her eyes at if she hadn’t been so shocked by the state of him. His arms were littered with what looked like bruises in the form of fingers, as if someone had grabbed him and thrown him around. There were cuts and bruises all over the rest of his face, and his short brown hair stuck up at an odd angle as if he’d just taken off a beanie. He wore a backpack that looked like it was one throw to the ground away from ripping at the seams and, for whatever reason, he wasn’t wearing shoes.

   They both sat in silence until he looked away, his shocked eyes then taking on a droopy, tired expression as he limped down the hall, his hand still supporting almost the entire weight of his body against the wall. His bare feet dragged against the hall floor, leaving dirt and blood behind on the linoleum. Y/N choked on her breath as she exhaled, not having noticed that she’d even been holding it.

   What the fuck? What the fuck?

   She scrambled to her feet, the book now long forgotten as it fell to the floor once again, and she fumbled with the doorknob as it slipped in her sweaty palms. When she finally got the door open, she stared down the hallway in the direction he’d gone, but she was met with nothing but an empty corridor.

   Where could he possibly have gone that fast?

   She stepped carefully and quietly, making sure to keep her footfalls as light as possible, as she walked in the direction she’d seen him go. She passed each door, looking for any sign that he might have been there, when finally she stopped in front of one with blood on the silver handle. Glancing up at the name tag that adorned every door, Y/N swallowed the dry lump in her throat and her eyes widened as she took in the name.

   Peter P.

   Oh dear God. What the hell did she just herself into?

━━━━━━━━

A/N: i’m so sorry but this is going to be the slowest slow burn in the history of slow burns, maybe ever. hope ya’ll are into pain. 

ALSO i spell everything the canadian way, ya know, with ou’s and shit... if that bothers you then whoOps sorry

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tags: @psychedelicmagnum @jazmins-main-hoe

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#ohoho it's finally here hope u enjoyyyyy #spiderman #spider man #fanfiction #fanfic #fic #peter parker x reader #peter parker x you #spiderman x reader #marvel #marvel fic #mcu fanfic #spider-man fanfic #college au #college!au #marvel college au #spiderman fanfic #spiderman fanfiction #peter parker fanfic #peter parker fanfiction #tom holland #tom holland x reader #tom holland x you #reader insert #spiderman college au #spider man college au #spider man homecoming #spider man far from home #infinity war #peter parker fic

[rock-hopperhazuki]

Yeh Imma post this before I sleep

You know what? I’m up late, feeling like ranting about something so Imma do it. I just feel like getting this off my chest, laying it all out, and in turn give yall a glimpse into my current situation and why I’m just not doing well lately. If you don’t wanna read it, I’ll put it below, cause it is a LOT. This is my longest post yet and I go into a bit of detail about me and my bf and our experience at our job cause that’s what started all this. READER BE PREPARED! (I also wrote this in the last hour or so and don’t know if there are many mistakes, probably gonna go over it to see, but meh):

Alright, let’s go back to the VERY beginning.

Jan. 24, 2017 was my first day at my first job. I’m a janitor at one of the courthouses in town. That was also the day I became acquainted with one of the only other young employees there: Robert. 

We quickly became friends and even tho we only get to see each other during our 45 minute lunch break and when we clock out for the night, it only took like two weeks for us to go on our first date, kiss, and start going out. (my first intimate relationship ever, mind you) And it also only took another two weeks for us to get in trouble. And that trouble was getting caught making out and heavy petting in the elevator (which we were doing for about 30-45 minutes apparently) by one of our supervisors after lunch. 

Also, up until this point only about 2 other employees that we were cool with knew we were together, it came as a shock to our superiors. So we get called down to the office and interrogated separately. Both explaining the situation the best we could. Granted this wasn’t planned or anything, it just happened and we lost track of time. We get reprimanded and told that the manager would discuss this with us the next day when he came in. So I’m freaking out thinking we’re gonna get fired, and only after I’d been there for only about a month.

But, when we speak with the manager the next day he basically said: “We don’t care that you guys are going out, so long as you don’t get married while you’re both working here and you’re not ‘stealing time’ being all affectionate”

Stealing Time is basically not working while you’re on the clock, they consider that stealing cause you’re getting paid to clean and you’re not doing that, and still collecting a check. 

I’m super relieved and glad we can be together and that we didn’t get fired. Most places don’t allow couples to work in the same place, so I’ve heard. Afterwards we become a bit more open with our relationship. Everyone now knows we’re together and we get teased a little and called cute by our, mostly older, co-workers. And everything is pretty cool...until we get into more trouble down the line.

Me and Robert get back from lunch a few minutes late once or twice (not because of elevator shenanigans tho, we went out to eat and came back late). We get a warning and afterwards our supervisors give us strange looks and come to our floors more often to check on us. Which doesn’t do wonders for my anxiety and paranoia btw.

Robert had his own run-in with trouble down the line as well. There was a new girl who worked on the floor above his, but the hose in her janitor’s closet didn’t work or something like that so she was allowed to go to his floor and use the hose in his closet to fill her bucket for mopping and other bottles. We were cool with her, so when she came to his floor everyday, they would talk a little before she left.

She also didn’t like our superiors very much, and one day one of them came to Robert’s floor while they were talking in the closet. In turn, she SLAMS the closet door shut while they’re still inside so he won’t ‘be listening on our conversation’ or whatever. But the slammed door brings him right over and he opens the door. AND FOR SOME REASON, she tries to hide behind the door so he won’t see her. Of course he does and the situation looks bad. Robert tries to play it off, but HE gets in trouble regardless because, get this: they think they were basically doing what we previously did in the elevator (stealing time, getting frisky, whatever). But also get this: they don’t call HER to the office, just him. And he gets a strike against him. He tried to explain what happened and defend himself, but they just don’t listen or even let him speak for himself.

That kinda puts a damper on our relationship with her. And tensions grow between us and the higher-ups. We start having lunch away from the other workers while in the cafeteria, and more time outside as well. 

Another incident happened during Chore Time.

Chore Time at my job is about 30-45 minutes before we clock out. During the day we do our designated areas and floors. But at Chore Time, we come down to the office and get assigned one last mundane job to do before we go. That night, I was to do the exit door glass on the first floor. So I took the paper towels and nearly empty Windex bottle they gave me and did my chore. I finished up pretty early and decided to go back to my floor to refill the bottle and wait a little bit before going back to the office to clock out.

When I got to my floor I saw Robert. He was doing the glass panes going down the hall as his chore. I decided to stop on my way to the janitor's closet on my floor to talk to him. It’s still kinda early, I thought. I have some time. And wouldn’t ya know it? One of our supervisors comes to my floor at that time. We get reprimanded for just talking and I tell him I didn’t intend on just standing around talking until it was time to go. I was gonna go fill the Windex bottle and stopped to talk for a little bit. I didn’t know if he believed me, but I went on my way, filled the bottle up, and made my way to the office to clock out with everyone else.

I thought that was the end of it, but the next day we’re called back down to the office cause the supervisor that caught us the night before called the manager. We are told once again that we aren’t to be ‘stealing time’. The supervisor interjects and says that Robert was still working while I was talking to him (technically not ‘stealing time’) and that I was the one standing there, not where I’m supposed to be (even tho that was my floor). He says that I lied about going to fill the Windex bottle cause I wasn’t anywhere near my closet. Even tho I was already on my way there when I stopped to talk to Robert. I didn’t even know he was up there. I tried to explain this to the manager, but he didn’t want to hear what I had to say (just like how they didn’t want to listen to what Robert had to say before) and sent me home early.

Now, I’m upset, but inside I’m kinda like “Whatever man” and I just peace out and call my ride. Robert is way more angry that they sent me home and I text him to calm him down, I’ll be back tomorrow. When I do, I ‘apologize’ for ‘lying’ to my supervisor and promise not to ‘steal time’ with Robert again and got right back to work.

Things are tense, but for a while there aren’t anymore incidents. My anxiety and paranoia go down while I’m working and I feel better knowing that if anything’s wrong or bugging me that I have Robert and during lunch we talk a lot. We are still affectionate with each other, but only during that 45 minute lunch we have. The only time we have to ourselves. No rendezvous in the elevator’s after lunch, no stealing time to make out. None of it. Only during lunch. 

Until our manager eventually tells us that we shouldn’t be affectionate inside the building since state workers may see us and disapprove, even when we’re in the cafeteria, on the lowest floor, during our lunch when most of the state workers are gone or on the upper floors in their offices staying late. We are upset, but decide to try to have lunch outside every day. Even when the weather gets cold, we stay out in the courtyard and eat. And for a while that’s fine.

Until later down the line, we get told that we can’t be affectionate out there either, since state workers leaving late could still see us when they leave and we need to ‘uphold the company image’. Even tho they are never that close to us and they don’t even give us a second glance. It’s not like we’re constantly lip-locked or anything. They never seemed to have a problem with any of this before.

So now, we’re both mad. They seem to be constantly tightening the reins on us. If you go back you’ll see that they said they didn’t care what we did so long as we’re not ‘stealing time’ or get married while still working here. We were told at the beginning that we could be a couple in this place and they keep trying to put a stop to what we do when we’re together.

They also pulled some other stuff. The other court building was down a person and needed a replacement for 6 weeks. Other than the handful of new people with no real defined job yet, they asked me first if I would take the position, saying I could say yes or no. At first I said yes, but once I really thought about it, I declined cause I didn’t want to be gone from Robert that long. Also the hours are shifted slightly and with the way my ride to work is set up, it wouldn’t have worked.

The next person they went to was, of course, Robert, but this time they didn’t give him the option to say no. They just gave him the position. Trying to split us up. Now, he wasn’t completely transferred over there, just filling in. And since their hours over there are different than ours, how it worked would be:

He goes into work at our courthouse at the usual time and does his usual work

When the time comes, he makes his way down the street to the other court building and does his duties there

When it comes time for them to clock out, he goes back down the street to our courthouse and finishes up his usual work and clocks out with the rest of us like he always does

Which meant I only saw him for the final 15 minutes of our usually 45 min lunch and when we clocked out at the end of the night. For 6 weeks. I was frustrated that they did this, but we made our time together count until he finally came back to work fully at the courthouse again. We were glad to be back on our regular schedule. And even more affectionate.

We just disregard their rules while they’re not around. But it turns out our good fortune ran out. We were apparently caught on camera kissing and one of the security guards told our supervisors (which is CRAZY cause we’ve been together this long and there are obviously cameras in the courthouse but they never saw fit to tell anybody about us if they saw something, UNTIL NOW APPARENTLY. JUST OUR LUCK). 

So last Wednesday, I was called into the office where our manager and the cleaning manager of the court building down the street were sitting there with our HR rep on the phone. And basically it was explained to me that after all that’s happened, in order to uphold the company image and keep both me and Robert as employees, I’d be transferred to the other building starting the next day.

I have no idea what they told Robert once he was called in, but at lunch we sat across from each other on a bench outside. Not touching, not looking at each other for a bit. When he finally spoke and asked me if I was alright, I broke down and cried. Went into full panic attack mode. My head hurt, I had trouble taking a breath, I felt sick, sad, angry, scared. So many things went thru my head. 

I wanted to quit right then and there. Just say F*CK IT. But I couldn’t. At least not right now. My family depends on me now to help pay for things around the house. And I’m trying to go on a trip with friends of mine in October. I need the money. But I didn’t want to go over there. I didn’t want to go over there when they asked me and now they were forcing me to go. I’d just gotten Robert back from that place and he didn’t have much good to say about it either.

But even during my breakdown, Robert was comforting and level-headed. He promised me that things would be ok and that this was a sure sign that we needed to move on from this place and find better jobs, make a better life for ourselves, and strive for greater things than this place. He said all the right things, but I still felt hollow. I still kinda feel that way and it’s almost been a week since it happened. 

I don’t like it very much over there. I don’t get to see Robert during the week. We talk on the phone tho. We’ve both been looking for new jobs and have applied to a few places. No luck yet and I’m feeling very discouraged about all this.

He tells me not to worry, good things come to those who wait, our breakthrough is close, all that. But rn, it doesn’t feel like that. I just feel...bummed and defeated. I’ll keep going, I’ll keep looking, I just feel like the enemy won this round. And it really SUCKS. I never really liked this place, but I never imagined it’d get to this point. 

Imma keep searching and praying that things work out for the both of us. I gotta be strong and stay positive, it’s just not easy. Annnnnnnnd that’s where we’re at right now, I guess.

#man this was a lot #my hands hurt #I just let this flow over the (now) last hour or two #welp #that's what's up peeps #://// yikes #man i'm tired #emotionally physically and mentally #and hungry #I need foods #bye for now #words of advice and encouragement would be very much appreciated #just throwin that out there #My Posts

[truereviewpage]

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeatedly screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just after some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town’s Historic Review Board has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

We missed the November review board meeting by a hair, and the December one was postponed due to the holiday. They’re 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five-month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall nor a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

The post Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes appeared first on Young House Love.

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes published first on https://aireloomreview.tumblr.com/

[statusreview]

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeatedly screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just after some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town’s Historic Review Board has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

We missed the November review board meeting by a hair, and the December one was postponed due to the holiday. They’re 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five-month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall nor a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

The post Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes appeared first on Young House Love.

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes published first on https://ssmattress.tumblr.com/

[yesterdaysdreams]

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeatedly screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just after some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town’s Historic Review Board has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

We missed the November review board meeting by a hair, and the December one was postponed due to the holiday. They’re 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five-month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall nor a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

The post Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes appeared first on Young House Love.

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[billydmacklin]

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeated screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof on it (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

Our contractor Sean was presenting the changes to the review board, 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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, the panel of 4 people were split on our proposal, 2-to-2. At one point it had seemed like they were 3-to-1 in our favor, but something switched right at the end, and it wasn’t enough to pass. 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall or a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

The post Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes appeared first on Young House Love.

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes published first on http://ift.tt/2BedaSe

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Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes http://ift.tt/2mGskIZ

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeated screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town’s Historic Review Board has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof on it (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

We missed the November review board meeting by a hair, and the December one was postponed due to the holiday. They’re 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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, the panel of 4 people were split on our proposal, 2-to-2. At one point it had seemed like they were 3-to-1 in our favor, but something switched right at the end, and it wasn’t enough to pass. 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five-month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall or a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

The post Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes appeared first on Young House Love.

#additionally sad home renovations

[lowmaticnews]

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeated screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town’s Historic Review Board has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof on it (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

We missed the November review board meeting by a hair, and the December one was postponed due to the holiday. They’re 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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, the panel of 4 people were split on our proposal, 2-to-2. At one point it had seemed like they were 3-to-1 in our favor, but something switched right at the end, and it wasn’t enough to pass. 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five-month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall or a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

The post Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes appeared first on Young House Love.

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes published first on http://ift.tt/2hUI8pL

[lukerhill]

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeated screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town’s Historic Review Board has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof on it (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

We missed the November review board meeting by a hair, and the December one was postponed due to the holiday. They’re 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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, the panel of 4 people were split on our proposal, 2-to-2. At one point it had seemed like they were 3-to-1 in our favor, but something switched right at the end, and it wasn’t enough to pass. 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five-month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall or a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

The post Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes appeared first on Young House Love.

[vincentbnaughton]

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeated screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town’s Historic Review Board has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof on it (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

We missed the November review board meeting by a hair, and the December one was postponed due to the holiday. They’re 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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, the panel of 4 people were split on our proposal, 2-to-2. At one point it had seemed like they were 3-to-1 in our favor, but something switched right at the end, and it wasn’t enough to pass. 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five-month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall or a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

The post Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes appeared first on Young House Love.

[truereviewpage]

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeatedly screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just after some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town’s Historic Review Board has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

We missed the November review board meeting by a hair, and the December one was postponed due to the holiday. They’re 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five-month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall nor a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

The post Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes appeared first on Young House Love.

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes published first on https://aireloomreview.tumblr.com/

[truereviewpage]

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeatedly screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just after some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town’s Historic Review Board has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

We missed the November review board meeting by a hair, and the December one was postponed due to the holiday. They’re 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five-month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall nor a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

The post Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes appeared first on Young House Love.

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes published first on https://aireloomreview.tumblr.com/

[truereviewpage]

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeatedly screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just after some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town’s Historic Review Board has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

We missed the November review board meeting by a hair, and the December one was postponed due to the holiday. They’re 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five-month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall nor a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

The post Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes appeared first on Young House Love.

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes published first on https://aireloomreview.tumblr.com/

[yesterdaysdreams]

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeated screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town’s Historic Review Board has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof on it (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

We missed the November review board meeting by a hair, and the December one was postponed due to the holiday. They’re 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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, the panel of 4 people were split on our proposal, 2-to-2. At one point it had seemed like they were 3-to-1 in our favor, but something switched right at the end, and it wasn’t enough to pass. 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five-month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall or a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

The post Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes appeared first on Young House Love.

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[statusreview]

Why Renovations Can Make You Want To Scream Into A Pillow Sometimes

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’ve always 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 can’t find the water meter for a month or we fail our irrigation inspection in three different and spectacular ways).

Sometimes on “Bad News Day 1” you don’t really feel like getting into all of the nitty-gritty details because you’re still in that “repeated screaming WHYYYY?!?!?” phase of things. But you also don’t want to just pretend everything’s ok and post something chipper with lots of happy 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 aren’t always easy, but in the scheme of things there’s still lots to be grateful for (like family, health, pets, tiny 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 usually comes after sleep (or just some time in general) and we’re already feeling more clear-headed about the whole thing. And we have a Plan B that’s already rolling forward! Slowly rolling as if it’s riding a sloth, but it’s rolling. So we wanted to fill you all in. It all has to do with the beach duplex we’re 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 just keep multiplying. Things that were simple 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’ve been trying to pull our permit since November. And this place isn’t getting any safer/cleaner/less moldy.

The backstory, which we covered in podcast Episode #78, is that we’re proposing some exterior changes to the duplex, so the town has to approve them. Most of it was small and basically 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 help it shed water better and allow us to put on a more affordable asphalt shingle roof on it (rather than an expensive and sometimes faulty rubber/metal flat roof). It would not only make it more reliable as a rental roof (definitely don’t want people calling to say there’s 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 really just for cuteness, since a lot of extremely similar homes within this historic town already have the exact roof pitch and dormer we were proposing. This picture sort of shows you what we were thinking the roofline/dormer would look like. This isn’t a house in town, just an inspiration pic we’ve been referencing that reminds us of the duplex:

Our contractor Sean was presenting the changes to the review board, 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 didn’t expect to get approved. It’s 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’s 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, the panel of 4 people were split on our proposal, 2-to-2. At one point it had seemed like they were 3-to-1 in our favor, but something switched right at the end, and it wasn’t enough to pass. 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 didn’t even register on the same scale – let alone rise to the level of getting rejected. We don’t fault the members of the board for trying to protect the integrity of the town (that’s their job!) and we can’t 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 recently-fixed-up homes in the historic district had already done without being rejected. And even Windex wouldn’t help.

So we said “Ok, Plan B – we’ll 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’s approved, we have to wait 30 MORE days to be issued our permit thanks to a new waiting period they’ve just begun imposing this year. Which means that we won’t have a permit in our hands to begin working on this house until March 25th. Almost April. For two people who have been itching to fix this poor house up since November, well, a five month delay pretty much makes you feel like you’re 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 added to our cost (so we’re 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’ve got bigger problems. So we’re trying to shift our focus to all of the OTHER improvements we’ll 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 pretty 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’re 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 entire 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 love this show) we should get approval in the next meeting, and finally get down to business in late March/early April. It’s just hard to smile about that when you’ve been waiting so long.

We also mentioned there was a financial blow, which was just a really (really really) high quote from a subcontractor that we didn’t expect at all. We found another sub who can do the job within our budget (and he’s great! we actually used him before!) but it took a few hours of panicked calls that we didn’t expect to be making, so the entire 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 definitely happens, and it’s not that we didn’t expect it. We expect curveballs. But we haven’t even started yet! Nary a piece of mildewed drywall or a single foam ceiling tile has been removed. And considering we just spent the last year fixing up a house that’s ONE FREAKING HOUSE AWAY from this one and none of these early-on issues popped up, it just caught us off guard. But there’s that awesome quote by Veronica Dearly that I’m keeping in mind these days. Because guys, it’s 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 couldn’t 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’re back on track. Even better, we’re on a mission. We’re following some leads that there might be some way to get around the 60-day hold that we’re in right now – and already have some calls in to a few different people so feel free to hold your breath with us! And whenever we actually get this place is done (2027? will there be flying cars?), we think it’s gonna be PRETTY FREAKING GREAT. We’re 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’s never fun to share your whiny-pants with the world, this is real. Real dollars. Real timelines. And real disappointment. So it just felt like it wouldn’t have been even a little bit authentic to act like all of this crap in the background wasn’t happening (or that it wasn’t 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.

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