An Open Letter to Myself 4 Years Ago

Hey there self. This is you, only from 4 years in the future, a little older and a hell of a lot wiser. I know you just bought your 1890's townhouse in Brooklyn and are excited and nervous about the prospect of gut renovating the whole thing. Yes, this is a whole new experience for you and while you're usually pretty scrappy and have an uncanny ability to learn and stay on top of things, here's a few pointers that you might not be aware of that could help make this whole experience much less offensive, demoralizing and downright hellish. Apropos illustrations are from ICHC

EVERYONE IS OUT TO GET YOU

Not literally of course, but figuratively for sure. The entire (legal) renovation process with the permits, filing and an endless array of professionals, engineers and subcontractors is designed to bleed every last penny from the unsuspecting homeowner and leave you confounded and destitute. The various engagements you have with your architect, code consultant, structural engineer, contractor, expeditor and an entire parade of suppliers and subcontractors will all start off pleasantly enough, but soon after their first series of checks have cleared you will notice a distinct air of obfuscation. It is in all these people's best interest to keep you in the dark as much as possible about the day to day progress and technical details of what is going on at your job site. They will get away with this by putting you in positions where you have no choice but to rely on their "expertise", which you might do initially but begin to question when prices and procedure seem unnecessarily high and complicated. They will only disclose information to you if 1) they require more money or 2) they can blame it on someone else. If you question their calculations and reasoning they will become defensive and desperately try to justify their position. One choice you have is to bring an opposing, second opinion in to verify you first and that will of course cost you more money. A good example of this might be, let's say hypothetically, an architect who recommends a structural engineer that he is friends with, who charges a huge amount of money to design a cellar dig and makes the entire process unnecessarily complicated and twice as expensive as it should be. You could bring another structural engineer in and pay him to present his cheaper and less complicated plan, but don't expect to stay in your architect or main engineer's good graces after that. You will be labeled a "problem client" and will be treated with scorn and excessive eye-rolling going forward. A thick skin helps, but remember that you will need to continue to speak with and deal with these people for years to come and overcome urges to slam their heads against walls repeatedly.

NO ONE CARES IF THEY ARE INCONVENIENCING YOU

Let's face it, renovation is like war, and war is hell, so by the transitive theory Renovation = Hell. It's not going to be pleasant, which I'm sure you already know and accept. Some things you can prepare yourself for, dust, dirt, noise, etc. They are par for the course and you can resign yourself to a certain amount of inconvenience over the next few years. But let's say, for example, after the 10^th time that the workers left for the day and there is no heat or water for you overnight, you realize that they really have no interest in the fact that you live upstairs and need to go about living while this work is being performed. At first your contractor might apologize and even come over himself to try to get water/heat/cooking gas/electircal/etc working for you, but after a few months you will be a nuisance for asking for these basic necessities. In fact, you will have to listen ad naseum to your contractor telling you it's your fault for trying to live in the building while the work is going on and how much money they are losing ensuring that things work every evening when they leave. Nevermind the fact that this was all discussed up front, over and over again, and should have been factored into their bid on the job. Nevermind the fact that you know exactly how much money he pays his guys, exactly how much money he pays his subs, exactly how much money he pays for supplies and thus exactly how much money he puts in his pocket. It's your fault for wanting heat and hot water in the dead of winter. You bitch. You're lucky to get what they give you.

RENOVATION BRINGS OUT THE WORST IN EVERYONE

It will bring out the worst in you as well, but guess what? You are the client and everyone else is your employee! They are paid to take a certain amount of shit from you but in reality you will have to take a hell of a lot more shit from them. You'll have to deal with some, if not all of these fantastic characteristics in people:

• Contractors and Architects playing the "my Ivy league school was better than your" pissing match
• Plumbers telling you that you are "just a girl" and don't need to know the mechanics of how your boiler works
• Electricians making obscene and lecherous advances
• Thieving subcontractors and the loss of hundreds of dollars worth of your personal items
• Swastikas drawn repeatedly in your home and no satisfactory apology or resolution
• Constant nasty critiques in your choices of stove, lights, design choices, etc (both behind your back and to your face)
• Subcontractors smoking and urinating in your house (not in a bathroom obviously) despite your repeated requests on the contrary

Just do yourself a favor and remember that none of this people are your friends. Hell they aren't even friendly acquaintances. They are here to do a job and you are here to pay them and make sure they do it right. This also means you don't need to be pleasant or even pretend to care when they drone on to your about their laughably dramatic personal lives.

JUST BECAUSE YOU HIRE "EXPERTS" DOESN'T MEAN THEY KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY ARE DOING

Obviously you are hiring people to help you out because the project is too big for you to tackle on your own. You might be handy with a hammer and screwdriver, but there are certain things like rebar, structure steel and joist leveling that best left to professionals. You will need to resign yourself to the fact that you don't know everything and put a little bit of faith into the people performing the work on your job. And they will drastically disappoint you. Sure the walls and floor might stand intact, but there will always be head-poundingly obvious lapses in skill and judgment on their part that results in a huge headache for you for the rest of the future time you have in your home. An example of this would be, again purely pulled out of thin air, when less than a year after their installation all your kitchen cabinets come crashing down off the wall. In attempting to repair they you will discover something infuriating like the fact that the people who hung the cabinets used sheet metal screws instead of wood screws and that the screws were barely long enough to make it into the sheetrock, much less into any studs or plywood behind the sheetrock. You might also find a huge cabinet held up by only 6 of these screws, destined to fall shortly after all the checks clear. How would you know this unless you stood behind them and examined every screw they used? Another example of this might come from your expeditor, who will not speed anything up in any way, shape or form and your code consultant, who when faced with a question about building code with invariably answer "it depends" or "I don't know". The expert title simply allows them to collect a paycheck but does not require that they actually know what they are doing. Nevermind that if you failed at your job so miserably you would have been fired long ago. The bar is set MUCH lower here, so don't expect to work with any geniuses.

YOU HAVE ALMOST NO RECOURSE IF/WHEN THINGS GO HORRIBLY SOUR

If you've done your due diligence and filed your job to the letter of the law using all the proper professionals and engineers along the way, you are pretty much married to these people for the course of the renovation, which will take 3-4 times longer than any of them estimate. Should you get pissed off at anyone along the way and want to replace them, one look at the monetary and administrative cost involved in replacing them will have you sticking it out until the end with an incompetent person that you can't stand. Yes, it's that hard to get rid of them. If you've decided upon a contractor you feel you can trust that in no way means that this contractor will hire subs that you like or trust. In fact in many cases they will simply go with the lowest bidder so they can pocket the maximum amount of your cash while pointing the finger at their own incompetent sub, which they don't seem to realize simply means they chose badly. Worse yet is when they DON'T sub things out and have their own staff perform duties that should be done by an expert. An example of this might be your average day laboring installing a prefinished wood floor so impossibly wrong that the boards buckle and break within just a few months of all the checks clearing. Or your average day laboring installing a litany of high end bathroom fixtures and literally destroying almost every single on in the process. Guess who pays for their replacement? That's right, it's you. And should you decide at some point to withhold payment from any of these subs or GC's, they have the right to put a lien on your house for whatever amount they feel they are owed, regardless of how much work they have actually done (or done correctly) In fact, if you decide you want to sue any of these people they can hide behind the construction laws of "substantial completion" and say that they finished the work they were contractor for. Who cares if all the detailing in your home looks like it was installed by a 5 year old with tourettes and things are failing and falling off the walls on a weekly basis? It's substantially complete so you probably have no legal recourse.

So knowing all this information now, self, would you still go through with your renovation? Probably, right? But maybe with a do over you would have picked an entirely different set of (most likely also) incompetent and intolerable people to work with. The only nice thing about it is you will have this blog to vent about all your frustrations. Just do yourself a favor this time and don't give any of your staff the link or else you'll have to censor yourself to the point where you just don't write anything at all because you have nothing nice to say. Better yet blog anonymously (and cowardly in my opinion) to reveal your true feelings about the entire process. Oh and stock up on whiskey.

Comments

[modernemama]

Been there, done that. I feel your pain. And then I found an honest Handyman who does better tiling work than the $$$$$ tiler guy, is better at woodwork than the "Carpenter" and who thinks most electricians are lazy and should do things properly. And who never, ever rips me off. Unfortunately I cannot reveal his name because he is so in demand I'd never get him back to work on my house.........

[mrslimestone]

Great post!

I was very lucky not to have to go thru quite the torture you have gone through but Ive had my share of experience in all the categories you've mentioned. I seriously don't know how you could tolerate renovating for 4 years! After more than a year, Im this close to the looney bin.

Its clear to me I chose the wrong profession. Why am I working in an industry that expects me to show up, be knowledgeable, work long hours, be courteous or have to suffer the consequences when I could have gotten into construction and be the unrelenting bitch Im so good at being and get rich? Big mistake on my part.

[dana]

Hey Modernmama - hold on to that handyman - a good one is so hard to find!

thanks for the empathy Mrs. Limestone - you really hit the nail on the head about us both choosing the wrong profession. I often think I should have gone into construction management or weather reporting...where else do you get paid to be wrong most of the time?