There’s a show on the Home and Garden Network called “Love it or List It.” Perhaps you’ve seen it. The premise is that a very photogenic young couple with unlimited disposable income lives in a house with a major, unsustainable design flaw: something horrible, like a walk-in closet that is too small, or a master bathroom with only 1 sink. The couple then has an hour to decide whether to remodel the house (love it) or sell it and buy a more appropriate domicile (list it.)
If the couple chooses to remodel their home things move quickly. They decide on Monday to remodel, by Tuesday plans are finalized, construction starts Wednesday and by Saturday they are entertaining all their equally photogenic friends in their new eat-in kitchen that is tricked out with a Sub-Zero refrigerator and built-in wine cooler.
For my partner and me, “Love it or List it” was a daily discussion for several years. We lived in a crumbling, 1950’s ranch house that we loved in a neighborhood that we also loved and we made the decision –unwise in retrospect—to renovate by enlarging the kitchen and adding a bedroom, bathroom and family room.
“It’s way easier than packing up and moving,” I said.
“And probably faster, too,” he agreed.
We did not learn until later that drawing up plans and getting permits would take a full year, and that getting the permits took almost as long, and was nearly as expensive, as drawing up the plans.
We did not know that contractors and subcontractors lie as easily as they breathe and that most are unable to read a blueprint. We learned this the hard way when we discovered that that the plumbers had relocated the lines for the new bathroom sink into the dining room. We also discovered that most construction workers feel that using a level is somehow unmanly, or unseemly for a professional of their caliber: We are reminded of this any time we look at any door in our house.
After the plumbing debacle my partner and I decided we were not going to let a team of wholly unsupervised workmen destroy our renovation so my partner began checking the work of all the subcontractors on a daily basis. This did not win him friends, but he discovered errors on a regular basis that, undiscovered, would have added significant amounts of time or money to the job. As for me, I also was forced to essentially memorize our contract with the General Contractor since we were routinely charged extra for work that was included in the original contract. Additionally, I began a daily construction journal, and photographed everything, preparing my documentation for the lawsuit I figured was inevitable.
Looking back at my construction journal provides a snapshot of what our renovation was like. Some highlights:
- Roof trusses were the wrong size and had to be rebuilt. Six week delay.
- Windows were the wrong size and had to be reordered. Six week delay.
- Propane tank was the wrong size; they substituted a different size that they had in stock, but then the construction plans had to be resubmitted to the City for approval. Six week delay.
- Interior doors were the wrong style. Six week delay.
This does not take into account a myriad of other issues, like the driveway paver stones that were the wrong color, or the pallet of tile that shattered when it fell off a forklift, but was delivered anyway, (did they think we would not notice?) or the tile wall that fell down because the tile man used the wrong adhesive, or the literally dozens of other fuck-ups that transpired, all due to either the laziness or the incompetence (and often both!) of the subcontractors.
On TV the subcontractors are craftsman who take pride in their work and become good friends with the homeowners; they often laugh and joke and drink wine together. The TV contractors don’t tell the homeowner, as our electrician did, that he underbid the project and was not making enough money to make it worth his while to continue. The TV contractors don’t tell the owners, as our plumbers did, that our small project was not high on their priority list. The TV architects don’t tell the owners, as our architect did, that he didn’t want to make any more site visits because our house was too far from his Miami office, as though we had somehow moved our home to a more distant location while he was drawing up the plans.
In real life our relationships with the subcontractors veered from unfriendly to openly adversarial. We learned very soon that the goal of the subcontractors was to do the rock bottom minimum necessary to complete the job so they could get paid, generally trying to keep their shoddy work from the notice of the dreaded building inspectors, men whose laziness and incompetence, impossibly, exceeded that of the subcontractors. (case in point: The fence inspector who never left his car and made me fetch the permit for him so he could sign it as “approved”?
When the subcontractor’s work would fail the inspection, which was often, my partner and I got to witness first-hand the phenomena of the circular firing squad. The subs would blame the architect, the architect would blame the general contractor and everyone would blame the homeowner for insisting on the inclusion of a difficult, never-before-seen design element. Like a stall shower.
In the course of this excruciating process, which – I am not making this up – is about to enter its third year, we learned that anything not tied down will walk away from the job site. We learned that if the construction workers were both young and American they would spend their time whining about how hard the work was while trying to figure out how to avoid it. We learned that no one had time to do the job right, but, when they wanted to get paid, they made the time to do it over. We learned that completion times are expressed in dog time, not people time.
We also learned that for even the most loving, stable couple the rigors of living in a construction zone, surrounded by liars and incompetents while you watch your bank account hemorrhage money puts an incredible strain on a relationship. I have to admit there were several times when my only goal in life was to take my dog and escape to a double-wide hidden in the woods.
I’m told that renovation is like childbirth; that once it’s over I won’t remember the stress and strain. I disagree; during childbirth women are drugged to numb the pain, I’ve had to face this project cold sober.
And what would I say if someone said, “Love it or list it?”
Really? Do you really have to ask?