What now?

I love when a long renovation comes to an end, the feeing of tranquility that descends when you know you don't have to be dressed and decent at 7:30 AM, when the day will no longer be interrupted by shouts of "You did want the molding removed, didn't you?" or worse "Can you come here a minute, we may have a problem" and when all the power tools have finally been silenced. Even the mental anguish you experience knowing you went over budget despite swearing you wouldn't or the nagging feeling you overpaid for something trivial, there is, at last, a moment of peace that you, in your naivety, imagine will last forever.

At some point, though, this security blanket of home repair denial will be rudely snatched away from you, leaving you exposed and shivering in the cold light of reality. For me it came with the trifecta of the garage door that would no longer close properly, the loose mortar on the chimney and the holes in the fence the fencing guy swore didn't need replacing because it was "good for at least two more years". We set to work. The garage door was repaired by us and when the temporary fix no longer did the trick an "expert" came to fix the problem... and caused another bigger issue that blew the motor. Needless to say the firm's promise to make good meant they ran in the opposite direction and for the whole summer we parked the car outside. But winter will be here before we know it and neither of us fancied digging the car out of a snow bank so I gave in and called another firm. The garage door was fixed without further drama and at a better price than the first guy quoted. The chimney cap blew off in the hurricane, so we locked in a date to fix that and the crumbling cement pronto, except every time the masons came to start the pointing it rained. And by rain I mean tropical storm downpours. Today they found a few hours of sunshine and got the job done. The fence? Well in a rerun of this scenario, we braced and secured the fence. I was promised two more years and I will make sure I get those last few months, if I have to stand there and hold the thing up day and night.

So all was done and I was singing a happy song until I heard a thud that seemed to come from under the dining room floor. Just as the last issue had been taken care of, just as I was thinking we were done for this year, one of the basement windows, the one that had been nailed in place seven years ago by a contractor who thought it wouldn't open and then found he couldn't get it shut, one of a suite of four, fell off its opener. Just because it could.

Screens, doors and hostas

How did I spend my day?
First off I fixed the garage door. Not the one that failed in an ice storm on Valentine's Day this year. The other one. Someone had knocked the sensor off its box, either with the car or while manoeuvring the trash-can out of the garage. We should open the other door to take out the trash but one of us is too lazy and the other too clumsy to do it properly. Anyway, half an hour's playing with the lever, pull knob, buttons and sensor box and the door was fully functioning again.



Then I put back the screen door that the clumsy person knocked off its wheels during the party and even fixed the other one that has been only partially functioning since, oh I don't know, last summer. Pretty good going, huh?
And just because I was already sweaty and and dirty, I thought I might as well transplant another dozen or so hostas. What, you thought I'd finished that job weeks ago? Not quite.



The thing about transplanting perennials in the fall is that they will die back quickly now and then I'm left to wonder for the next six to eight months if they have really taken, or whether I just wasted several beautiful September days getting mucky when I could have been down at the beach with a book soaking up the last of summer.