The Inland Echo

By Gerry Frederick

Home improvement and renovation can often be described in the early stages as pure chaos with only a small spot light at the end of the tunnel. I see this all the time and some how I find a weird sense of comfort in it.

I guess I’m comfortable in the middle of all the apparent chaos because I can see through it. The chaos means that we are well past the planning and well into the real work at hand: renovations. The chaos stems from the mass of destruction and overall mess that goes along with the renovation process.

On the surface very little looks to be in any type of order. Walls partly removed but not all the way because they’re being held in place by only a wire or two. Flooring ripped up and piled off to one corner and the never to be underestimated clouds of dust with house parts leaning on walls where they don’t belong and bathroom fixtures stacked up in hallways.

The chaos means to me that things are happening. If the walls and flooring are torn up then we are on our way to replacing them. If you want a new kitchen then somehow the old one has to be removed. This means that the cabinets gotta come down and the counters ripped off. Kitchens and baths are comfort rooms in the house and seeing them dispatched to the floor can look to the untrained eye as outright chaos.

It’s hard for most to see past all the dust and rubble and vision a new shiny kitchen in a week or two. The chaos only grows when the homeowner wants a wall removed to create the new modern open kitchen. This adds greatly to the mess and apparent disorganization as you can imagine. Sure the window may still be there, but everything else is somewhere between the dining room floor and the front yard.

Rarely can you even see the floor under all the debris so imagining the new floor can be impossible. On television they never show any real home improvement demolition. They always show someone hitting a wall with a very big hammer or ripping a cabinet or two off the wall. Well I can tell you that it never happens that way in real life. If you whack a wall with a sledge hammer you will send debris all over the house.

There will be enough trouble managing the clean up without adding to the work by damaging a wall across the room that isn’t in the improvement plan. Kitchen cabinets are generally removed by un-screwing them and hauling them away. Flooring like carpet is cut into small, more manageable size chunks and removed that way. It still looks like chaos simply because it gets all piled up somewhere before it is removed.

It can be real easy to add to the chaos when things remain in apparent disarray for more than a few days because you are waiting for something like plumbing repairs or wiring. You can’t finish off the sink base cabinet without getting the plumbing just right. When everything is removed it’s a good time to make any repairs to kitchen or bathroom plumbing. If the sink is to be relocated then this only adds to the image of chaos.

My favorite image of real disorder has to be drywall and 2X4 fragments hanging off the ceiling by only few wires because we are waiting for the electrician to disconnect them. Some how this is an image homeowners just have a tough time with. I see what’s going on. I know why light switches are hanging in the middle of the room with no attachment to any walls. 

I can even picture the new wall soon to be constructed but when the homeowner gets to the top of the stairs they always hang for a moment or two and just look afraid to say the wrong thing. At the same time I’m standing there thinking, “What did you think it would look like? You wanted an open kitchen.” It always takes a moment to pass but slowly it passes. Chaos to them, comfort to me.

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2. Tackling bigger home improvement projects
3. How to upgrade your home’s flooring
4. Making your home better than when you bought it
5. How to use the economic downturn to improve your home