let the wild rumpus begin!

With a banging, a hammering, a sawing, a drilling, etc. We've worked out all the nitty-gritty, and tomorrow morning Erik's delivering the final contract to be signed. We make our initial payment (whoo-hoo! we're deeper in debt!), and work will start that afternoon.

Amusingly, a previously scheduled vacation (Rose had to cancel, figuring that one of us needed to be home to deal with the remodeling, and the friends I'm visiting are closer to me than to her) means that I'll be gone the first few days of the teardown and framing out. So I'll return Thursday afternoon to a slightly different structure.

On a side note: kitties are now confined to the first floor. We have an elaborate setup for their litterboxes, temporarily in the library, involving foamcore and a tarp so as not to ruin walls and flooring with kitty inaccuracy and litter-tracking. We had to move their feeding area, too - it's next to the fridge now. The door from the kitchen to the back stairs will remain shut (except when one of us sneaks out it to the basement) until the job is done. The worst days for them will be when the rerouting of an air duct necessitates shutting them in the library for two days (during the day - we can let them out at night). Poor kittehs!

cancel that order for Argentine wheelbarrows...

Did I forget to knock on a wood product when I mentioned my hopes that the budget would be fine? Because - eek! - Erik (our contractor) e-mailed Rose yesterday saying his preliminary numbers suggested the budget would be...uh, about twice what our actual, real-life budget is.

After several moments of panic (mine more than Rose's - she does this sort of budget-sledgehammering as part of her real job), we realized, well, we have options...but we can't really decide what they are till we get actual numbers so we know where to cut.

So this afternoon Rose met with Erik (I chickened out of being there - I wasn't needed, and I figured I'd probably eat my entire hand chewing on my fingernails from sheer nerves), and...well, first Erik said he'd overestimated the cumulative total number by a pretty significant degree (which means that rather than being twice our budget, his initial numbers were only 1.5 times the budget). However, after meeting, we realized there are a number of things we can do to whittle the budget down to affordability (and reasonability: that double-budget number was not only unaffordable, it was more than it made sense to put into this house, even if we could have afforded it), mostly involving changes in the roofing and insulation systems, which save pretty big chunks of change both in materials and (even more important) in labor.

So we're back to good: we're pretty sure we can shave the numbers down to a dull roar, maybe suh-light-uh-ly above where we wanted to be - but still doable.

Whew.

I had a moment of panic there - thinking ah hell, I'm just gonna delete this blog as reporting on the non-existence of a non-project would make dull reading. But we - like thunderbirds - are go.

Yea! (Wild moodswings to follow if data does not conform with expectations - I'll ask for the chemical mood-levelers if so...)