Danielle Crittenden's 1905 house in Washington, D.C. has been undergoing a major renovation for the past year (and off and on for over a decade). In this weekly summer series, which appears Fridays on HuffPost, Danielle records what it has been like for her and her family to live through the construction with their builders, Virginia-natives Brent and John.
My daughters, Beatrice [left] and Miranda, just before our kitchen was demolished. They were allowed to scribble all over the wallpaper before the sledgehammers flew--a longstanding childhood wish fulfilled!
MY FAVORITE STORY about renovation is inspired by an incident in the life of Denis Diderot, the 18th-century French philosopher and writer. An admirer sent Diderot a gift of a handsome Chinese silk robe. Diderot delightedly donned the robe and suddenly his old nightcap looked shabby. So he bought himself a new nightcap. Now his ancient slippers looked out of place. He replaced them and in his handsome new outfit sat down to write - but how could such an elegant figure sit at such a broken old desk? And so on, until the entire room was redecorated.
Our current renovation began in the same way: My silk robe was my oven door.
The hinges on the door broke almost a decade ago. The door would close about 9/10 but not quite all the way. The problem seemed simple enough: just replace the hinges. But the oven was so old that replacement parts no longer existed. I needed a new oven. BUT: The oven had been built into a cabinet - and so any replacement would have to be precisely the same (maddeningly small) size of the old oven (How small? Our annual 12-pound turkey resembled a 400-pound passenger squeezed into a super-economy seat. ) Also, the cabinet had been foolishly mispositioned so that you could not open the oven and the dishwasher at the same time. Why spend good money to rebuild a dumb cabinet?
No, the cabinet would have to be completely ripped out. And once that was gone, I began to think, a range could be installed along the adjoining wall...? Certainly it would allow for more counter space (the entire kitchen measured only 14-feet by 10-feet; it was much later that we learned it had been retro-fitted into an old tool shed). But, if I'm ripping out cabinets already, I'm renovating my kitchen. And if I'm renovating my kitchen, I'm embarking on a renovation of our entire first floor. Because not only is my oven in the wrong place--so is my whole kitchen.
For ten years I put up with my malfunctioning oven door while we fixed other areas of the house. We finally got rid of the Mexican-tiled master bathroom by ... you guessed it ... gutting the second floor and rebuilding it (because you see once we started thinking about changing the bathroom, we realized the master bedroom was also in the wrong place). That was a nightmarish year, and I'll spare you that story. Suffice it to say that whenever my husband and I hear someone say, "Oh they don't build homes like they used to," we burst out laughing. Ah yes, the days when they stuffed newspapers in the walls for insulation! When wood framing was set right against the chimney with no protection from the heat! Don't build them like they used to? They built them like crap.
However that first big renovation did have one positive result: It brought John permanently into our lives. Up until then, he'd appeared only very briefly to help Brent, his partner in their two-man business. He built a small side-porch for us and, later, a fence. He was silent, diligent, and good at what he did. And he provided a taciturn contrast to the two employees of the partnership. I'll call them Mike and Joe - that's probably the simplest thing, since those were their real names.
We got to know Mike and Joe during Brent's legendarily expensive repainting of the house exterior. They were good- natured, broken-toothed men who'd occasionally vanish on benders. The children adored them. They fished baseballs out of gutters, played Hot Wheels, and left dangerous tools excitingly within reach. One summer day, a bee of prehistoric hugeness buzzed Mike's head as he worked. He turned and sprayed it with his can of varnish. Not only did he kill the bee instantly, but he preserved it in flight, like a biological specimen, for all the neighborhood children to examine.
Mike and Joe got used to the sight of me in the morning, puttering around in my bathrobe and glasses with my hair sticking up. And I got used to being woken up by Mike grinning at me through my bedroom window as gonzo breakfast radio blared from below. Sports talk, Rush Limbaugh, the ads for the Sleep Number Bed - this is the soundtrack of construction, now as sweet to me as the song of nightingales. It means: the men are working. It means: one day, my house will be finished.
Before that day could arrive, however, the Diderot principle would have to be applied to the first floor. By then, Mike and Joe had long left Brent's employ, off on some eternal bender. It was just Brent and John alone who showed up on that first sunny morning, exactly this time last summer, armed with sledgehammers and a case of Bud, ready to deal with my oven door problem once and for all.
This series originates in the National Post.