The contractor had come by last Friday and Saturday to start removing the plaster ceiling in the garage and the garage door, nothing too exciting. The real construction was to start on Monday. The normal anxiety of the weekend ending was subsided by some excitement of the project officially starting.
Oh Monday. My morning began with a few minor mishaps right before leaving the house...I poured cold water into my tea (I forgot to turn the tea kettle on after I filled it with water). As a side note, I use Teavana's amazing loose leaf tea blends so couldn't exactly reuse the tea after this mistake. Anyways, after patiently waiting for the water to boil, steeping my tea, and transferring to my travel mug, I knocked the mug over and spilt the tea everywhere. We laughed as we quickly cleaned up the mess and darted out the door (sans Monday morning caffeine fix). Nick dropped me off at the subway station and wished me a good day, I laughed as I joked that it could only get better from here. (But really, I don't like to complain and always try to cease the day while appreciating how lucky I am so I try to always be consciously grateful, for many things but life in general. I like to think of myself as one of those "smile, smell the roses" kind of people because really what's there not to be happy about?!!). Anyways sorry for the side rant but spilling my tea was not the end of my day and I didn't huff and puff into work to announce to the office about my horrible, no good, very bad day. Nonetheless, in my terms it seemed to be "one of those days".
Later that morning I received a call from the contractor. This can't be good. First day on the job, is it possible for something to go wrong this soon? Well while removing the existing vinyl siding of the garage, they found an army of ants (about 20,000 - still not sure if this was an exaggeration or not) and lots of rotted wood. The contractor recommended demolition of all of the garage walls and rebuilding entirely from the concrete slab up. Yoinks! To be honest, we were pretty worried about the condition of the side wall to begin with hence our request for new vinyl siding along this wall. But any unexpected additional expense (on Day 1!) is a pretty big deal, especially when we're talking thousands of dollars. At this point, we weren't left with much of a decision unless we wanted to ax the project and let the walls rot away. We may have to resort to PB&J and mac and cheese for meals over the next few months but we will not have to shovel another ounce of snow from the roof nor risk damaging my car from sudden collapse of the rotted roof and/or walls. I think that's a reasonable sacrifice. Let's not forget the wonderful new bedroom (and garage)! :) A few pictures of what we came home to - check previous post for 'Before' pictures for comparison.
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| Demolition - Goodbye Garage! |
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| Full Dumpster (Day 1) |
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