It’s no secret that I am a total HGTV addict. It’s my go to station day and night, the background sound of my evenings, weekend mornings and Sunday nights if it isn’t football season.  So, you would think, watching all that home renovation, a 250 square foot addition to my 948 square foot house would have been a slam dunk.  But what’s that saying?  You don’t know what you don’t know. 

I have lived through 11 months of a fire restoration, a couple of kitchen remodels and a bathroom gut, so I am far from a reno virgin.  But I had never added square footage to my house, although I had been planning and dreaming about it since the day I moved in 30 years ago.

Of course, the size of the addition, the type of addition and where the addition would go over the years has changed many times.

I finally decided the two rooms that would make me the happiest were a new larger dining room and a laundry room/office.

Having laundry in the garage is very California, but I have always hated it.  In the summer, a pair of underwear always ends up in the dirt.  Winter with the rain and mud is even worse. Having an in-house space to wash and dry and moving my office to the laundry room, meant my second bedroom could finally be a guest room.  (Friends from outside of So Cal, I hope you are listening!).  I also want to entertain more, but it was always difficult with a small dining room that didn’t have direct access to the backyard.

So, the decision was made, the finances, after quite a few missteps, were obtained and off I went down renovation road.

Here are some of things I found along the trip.

There are lots of surprises- none of them good
Surprise!  The city won’t let you build where you planned so the whole laundry room must move to the OTHER side of the house.  Surprise! The deck D-Man and I spent one entire summer building is right where the footings go for the new rooms. (The deck was taken apart and must be put back together once everything is done).  Surprise!  The electrical panel must be upgraded. And then moved after the upgrade because of the new plan.  Surprise! The day they moved the panel, I rented a We Workspace so I could get some work done.  Only to be called home less than two hours after I got there because they needed to get to the crawl space in my bedroom.  The same bedroom Kody and Aja were sequestered in. (Kody wasn’t having strangers enter a room without his Mommy being home.)
Surprise! The only person who knew how to light my 1948 O’Keefe & Merritt stove after they turned off the gas to do some work was the guy from the gas company. Who was kind enough to come out after the whole kitchen smelled like gas.  What surprises me the most, is how anyone who doesn’t work from home ever gets an addition completed.  

Let me give you an example.  My air conditioning unit had to be moved to accommodate the new dining room. They moved it to a temporary location until a concrete slab and the electrical could be set up to move it to the permanent location.  The week the permanent location move was happening was the week we took a trip to Lake Tahoe.  I returned home to find it had been put back in its original spot, which was smack dab in the middle of my new dining room.  OOPS.

I also was surprised how many questions I had to answer on a daily basis and how hard it was to keep focused on MY work. Which brings me to the next point.

Unless you hire the designer, you are the designer. And it’s a lot of work.
I have binders full of pictures I have taken off websites and magazines.  I can look at tile, lighting and paint colors for hours.  I have been buying things for this renovation for years.  But even I got tired of sourcing (especially with the supply chain disaster), measuring and changing plans every time something we weren’t expecting popped up.  I rarely return anything, but I became a regular at the Customer Service desk at Home Depot.  A lot of drama that came up should have been caught earlier on.  My major complaint about my contractor is that he didn’t always watch the video all the way through.  I mentioned to him right after we submitted plans that I had changed my mind and wanted to do a stack washer dryer.  “No problem,” he said.  “Those are minor details.”

Except it wasn’t a minor detail when where I wanted to put the washer/dryer was right where the window was, along with it being a shear wall.  We managed to change it without having to resubmit to the city, but it was stress that shouldn’t have been there.

It ain’t like HGTV
First off, clean and job site are never in the same sentence.  That pristine yard the Property Brothers always seem to have while they are working on the house, didn’t happen at my place.  You know how they are getting ready to stain or paint something and Jonathan has samples and talks the homeowners through it?  The guy who was going to stain the shiplap for my dining room ceiling came with an opened can of stain, slapped it on two boards and said, “This is good right?”  I had asked for the stain to be as close to my new dining room floors and this color wasn’t in the ballpark.  In fact, it wasn’t in the parking lot of the ballpark.  When I said, “No, not good.”  His reply was, “Well, I guess we are going to have to try and get a custom color or something.”  I walked into my garage and produced a can of stain that once we put it on the board and held it next to the floor was almost an exact match. “You got any more of that?” Mr. Never To Be On HGTV asked. REALLY? 

The one thing I suggest you remember is it is going to get bad before it gets better.  The pictures above are a great example.  The one on the left is the BEFORE.  The one on the right is the AFTER.  Or at least the current AFTER.
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We are already a full month past what I thought would be the end of renovation road but starting to see it in the horizon.  Stay tuned.

This blog has been VERY neglected since the addition on my house has finally started.  Although it has been exciting to begin and see things happening, it has also not been conducive to me wanting to sit down and write about it every night.  Adding that with the band finally starting up again and work being, well, WORK, the only thing I seem to do after a long day is my new hobby.  I call it “rabbit holing.”

What is “rabbit holing”?  That’s when you start looking for a new dining room chandelier and basically spend two hours a night for a week searching for the perfect one that won’t be more than your house payment. Then you find it and it is back ordered and isn’t expected until Christmas of 2024.

To say my timing on doing this addition was a little off, is an understatement.  Every purchase has felt like trying to get Bruce Springsteen tickets.  The costs of lumber and labor have skyrocketed.  Even IKEA is picked over and covered with furniture and shelves that have “Temporarily Unavailable” tags.
Thankfully, from this perspective, I have literally been buying things for this project for years.  There has been laundry room tile in my garage for so long I had forgotten what it looked like.  Buying ahead, in this supply chain nightmare, has been a blessing.  Except I can barely walk in my garage.

Unfortunately, one thing I didn’t buy was windows.  That was left to my contractor, who apparently hadn’t done window ordering recently.  He said we had plenty of time.  He was wrong.  We ordered June 17th.   The timeframe they gave us was two months instead of two weeks.  That timeframe has come and gone.  They are scheduled to show up next week.  This has pushed the whole project completion date back to possibly October.  If we get lucky.

I ordered a door from Lowe’s.  The day it was scheduled to be delivered, they sent me an email saying they had cancelled the order with no explanation.  I re-ordered it, but delivery wasn’t an option.  It had to be picked up in the store.  Again, no explanation.

Forget calling to get answers.  I tried calling Lowe’s one day 15 times and never got anyone to pick up the phone.  Floor and Décor just plain doesn’t answer their phones at all certain days of the week.
The other issue has been the constant changes to the design, due to what I want to call, “Surprise Moments.”   I will go into some of those in more detail on another blog, but it goes without saying, none of these have been happy surprises.   Simply put, what it all means is I either had bought things that didn’t work and/or had to find things that would work.

I finally decided that for my own sanity, I had to make decisions, suck it up and get everything that I needed.  My credit cards are sad, but I feel like I can finally move on with my life.  For now.  While I was writing this, I got an email saying the fireplace that was coming tomorrow is now on back order.
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Rabbit hole, here I come.

So how have I survived waiting for the elusive permits to build my addition?  By building something else!  I designed and with the help of the D-Man, built a privacy wall behind my fire pit.  I then decided to do a little bit of finish work on my back garden.  The new Home Depot in Pasadena became one of the few stores I visited frequently during the pandemic.  Bringing home the wood and posts was no small feat in my pickup truck.  I ordered the black decorative screens from Walmart on line.  Then it became a lot of staining, measuring, cutting, drilling and driving deck screws in the boards and screens.  The D-Man had gotten me some new Ryobi tools for Christmas.  It was so much easier than when we built the deck using Black and Decker tools that are built for hanging pictures in an apartment! If you have any DYI plans, let me give you the best advice you will ever hear. GOOD TOOLS MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE!  I found some great solar lights from Plow and Hearth that fit on top of the posts and they actually provide some nice light in the evening.  Looking at it gives me hope, that yes, maybe some day, my little home will get a little bigger.

The traditional end of summer weekend wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for.  Except for a short barbeque, the D-Man, Kody and new kitten Aja spent most of the weekend inside, on the couch, watching basketball and horse racing.  The over 110 degree heat made even sitting out by the fire pit in the evening off the agenda.

It wasn’t surprising the summer of 2020 didn’t end as expected. “As expected” ended in March.  We roll into fall, where I would normally be anticipating the football season, but here we go, not knowing how long or what players will be in the game. 

Forget about doing live music gigs.  Even the Rose parade has been cancelled and every other holiday tradition, right up to Valentine’s Day of next year is kind of hanging in a closet of uncertainty, like my band wardrobe. Might be just as well I haven’t been out in public much.  I have only been able to have one mani-pedi and one hair appointment in six months.

There have been other disappointments and struggles for me this summer. Not as major as other people have faced.  I am still employed and everyone close to me is healthy.  I know others have had it a lot worse, but the constant stress of having to “mask up” and worry who you run into every time you leave the house has only added to my overall feeling of darkness.

In an effort to bring some joy into my life, I set out to adopt a kitten, looking to replace the void in our little family after losing Kato.  Even that was difficult, having more people looking for animals then available animals in the shelter.

Finally, I got the call I had been waiting for.  A beautiful two month old grey tabby was ready for me to adopt.  Her foster mother described her as high energy and a bit of a drama queen.  The smartest of the litter, a quick learner and affectionate, but very strong willed.  She sounded like a perfect combination.  She was named Apple, but I quickly renamed her Aja Blue, after my favorite Steely Dan album (Aja) and my favorite Steely Dan song (Deacon Blues).  The D-Man and I had been listening to a lot of Steely Dan this summer.

She has lived up to all the things her foster mother said about her. She spent the first week trying to show her 80 pound dog brother that she was ready to rumble until she finally realized he wasn’t going to fight her.  Instead Kody has gone in to tolerate mode, sometimes looking at me as if to say, “When is she going to stop being so crazy?”

Then about two weeks ago, I took her to be spayed. I took the day off from work and combined dropping her off and picking her up with having my electrical panel upgraded.  Maybe not the best combo in hindsight, since it was another hot day and there was no electricity.

I brought her home just as they were wrapping up and she was livid.  Livid that she had to ride in the car in a cage. Livid she woke up in pain and livid that she now had a cone on her head.  I made the mistake of trying to switch out the one they sent her home in with a softer one I had bought for her.  It didn’t fit and I couldn’t get the one she had been given back on.

So in the middle of having construction folks wrapping up, I had to get in the truck and drive her to the vet to have them put the cone back on.  Meaning another car trip that she was freaking out about.

I sat in the truck as they took her in, hot, stressed and wondering how in the heck I was going to get through two weeks with a kitten in a cone.  Two weeks?  I couldn’t imagine her wearing the damn thing for two minutes!  How was she going to eat and drink in that thing?  Would her cone head even be able to get into the fancy litter box with the small hole that I had bought for her?

The vet assistant who brought her out was wonderfully upbeat. “She did fine!” she told me. 

“So can she eat and drink in this thing?” I asked.  “I mean, do I have to take it off and try to get it back on again?”

“Oh no, kittens adjust.  Just leave it on for the two weeks. She will get used to it and do just fine.”

To say I was doubtful is an understatement.

Once I got her back home, she finally settled down and stopped trying to pull the cone off.  She even took a nap in it and sure enough, managed to eat and drink with it on.  Getting in the litter box, though noisy, barely phased her.

By the third day, she had her cone head walk down.  A little swagger with her big head swaying side to side, ready to face the world.  She quickly got  back to doing jumps, playing with toys and clearing the back of my office chair to land in the middle of my desk, all with a big plastic hat that should have thrown her balance way off.  This cone head existence had become her new normal.  She accepted it and moved on.  After all, there were wadded balls of paper to chase!

No 2020 wasn’t what we expected, any more than a kitten expects to wake up in a cone.  Livid to start, it takes less than a day to accept they have to wear something uncomfortable around their neck and move on.  They don’t spend a lot of time wishing for what was, because why do that when you can still play, eat and sleep on a comfortable couch or a sunny window? 
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It got me thinking.  We could all use a little bit of that cone head swagger now, couldn’t we?