My kids and I watched The Neverending Story on repeat in the 80s, but there IS a definite ending, when the dragon flies off into the sunset (if I’m remembering correctly–and that’s iffy.)

Not so for my upstairs reno, as it has been going on since this time last year and only now are the finishing touches materializing. The earrings, as it were, on my long-suffering pig.

First the backstory: I have lived in this house in Lake Highlands for 31 years. Scott and I were the third owners, having bought it from my brother, Ted, who bought it from the first owners, a family with 8 children. The house had never been updated, but the chimney had been removed and the garage closed in so that the dad could run his trains from the “station” in the garage up the fireplace and into the attic and back down again. The top floor consisted of two enormous bedrooms with multiple closets and a tiny bath. Clearly it was a dormitory situation for 3 boys and 5 girls.

YIKES!

But wait, there’s more: In addition to the unfortunate chimney removal, there was a very odd access to the attic through a missing wall in an upstairs closet, a ceiling fan cobbled together with a coffee can, the name EDDIE etched into every surface imaginable, and a sloping floor in the bigger dorm room. Over the years, we had remedied some of these–closed in the closet and created an actual door into the walk-around attic, replaced the coffee can configuration with a normal fan, and gotten rid of the fireplace entirely with our downstairs reno (another story for another time.)

The sloping floor remained until last spring, however. So that is where our story will begin.

I packed and cleaned out and packed some more, moving everything into a massive wad of boxes and furniture in both bedrooms, relegating most of the bathroom items to the donation bag. It was February and Beau and I felt confident we could be done by Summer.

COVID 19 and the subsequent housing/construction boom begged to differ.

The demo started in the early summer which was as soon as we could get anyone in to start the work. But the bath demo went very quickly, and so I was optimistic.

Then we scheduled the floors, but first the sloping floor had to be addressed. Beau enlisted the help of his dad, Richard, and they leveled the floor, which for the first time didn’t serve as a downhill racing venue.

Then the new floors were installed, beautiful engineered hardwoods that matched the downstairs.

So far, so good.

The bathroom guy could now return to start rebuilding the bathroom, appropriating a couple of feet from a closet to make the bath big enough for double sinks.

That’s where the universe began to work against us.

First off, I put a few gashes in my beautiful new floors by trying to move an armoire by myself. Believe me, I got an earful about how I should have waited for help, should’ve put footies on the furniture, shouldn’t have tried to do it myself. And on and on until I was suitable chagrined.

Secondly, we realized that because the sloping floors had been levelled and the new floors installed, no one had noticed, especially not the floor guys, apparently, that the door to the attic could not be opened now that the floor was about four inches higher than when the door was installed.

Thirdly, the guy we expected to return to rebuild the bathroom never showed up, and had seemingly vanished.

Beau was frantically looking for someone who could finish the bathroom, I was calling the flooring guys to come repair my “floor pas,” and we all stood around the attic door, as if it were the Eighth Wonder of the World.

I told you this is a neverending story, and so we will continue next week.

Things get oh, so much better. I mean worse.