**Cough, Cough** Home Renovation Lessons Learned

I'm still here. **cough, cough** We've been buried under all the dust involved with the 'face lift' of our new home.

Here are a few of the lessons I've learned during this renovation:

1. Do take the time to cover more than just the newly installed light fixtures with plastic before sanding cabinetry and taking up the tile flooring, because such tasks will leave a superfine layer of dust across the interior of your home that will rival the amount of ash that your grandma had all over her yard in Tacoma, Washington after Mt. St. Helen's blew back when you were a girl.

2. Take the time to be sure you've turned on only the lights in the fixtures NOT still covered in plastic in your new home...before you are nearly driven from the home by the smell of smell of melting plastic on hot bulbs.

3. If what you thought was "merely" a heavy film of grease on the kitchen walls around the stove does not come off the walls after inordinate amounts of scrubbing with sudsy Dawn, TSP and a stiff scrub brush...it is most likely a film of nicotine. From six-pack-a-day smoker.

4. Bugs of all kinds can survive in 2-years-vacant homes, and five dead cockroaches found in the newly cleaned out and bug-bombed fogged garage will cause horror-flick quality nightmares that will pervade your normally sweet sleep, and cast a pall over the wonderful experience of owning your beautiful new home. As in those kind of repeating nightmares that come back night after night taunting you with their realism, causing you to fret even in your sleep that you will accidentally 'infest' your sister-in-law's home where you are staying during the renovation and that she and her family will recoil in horror, thinking you and your family to be horribly disgusting and filthy because of it.

5. Just when you think you have the perfect time frame all mapped out for completing the 'flip', something seemingly insignificant will pop up that will bump all the remaining tasks off schedule and require calling around to reschedule help in the days ahead. This will happen a minimum of five times.

6. You will be happy to accept help of any kind, even from people who don't bother to read your notations on your painstakingly organized moving boxes (such as "FRAGILE" and "HEAVY") especially if it means being able to get to bed before midnight, because your back and feet will be screaming, lamenting the use of muscles you never knew you had.

7. Feeding your volunteer work crews from day to day will provide you with moments of hilarity you never thought possible before...like the day you ordered 14 tacos, 10 burgers and 10 orders of fries at a drive-thru (for a group of teens from church that were coming over to help), and the kid taking your order gasps, "T-TEN?! Ten small fries?" (with a "Say WHAT?!" kind of verbal double-take), and you must, with red face, admit that yes, we are in fact ordering 10 orders of fries. And you will feel that all the workers in the restaurant will be peering out the drive through window to witness the spectacle that is your family to put a face with the type of people order that many orders of french fries all at once. Then, you will get to the pick-up window and your husband will deadpan, "My wife was really hungry."

8. The projects that were slated to take only a week on paper will stretch into at least 2 weeks, with the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel looking very faint off in the distance, because of all that still needs to be done and because the carefully rendered master list was cast aside in favor of 'winging' it.

9. Your son will come down with the flu during the window of time between getting moved out of the old house and into the new, hampering your ability to supervise help with certain crucial aspects of the transition that will further set you behind on both the move out and the renovation prior to move in. Things like the crucial order of first sanding and removing floor before dusting and washing down walls to prepare for painting, making it necessary to do this lovely little chore twice.

10. You will suffer extreme fatigue after the final 'inspection' on the old house, knowing that the really hard work hasn't even begun yet, and will feel uncharacteristically out of control and snappish, to the point where everyone in your life will look at you like you've lost it...only to realize that you were trying to catch your breath due to a horrible asthma attack you didn't even realize was upon you until you were wheezing and gasping for air...no thanks to all the cleaners being used in the house all at one time. And you will want everyone (even those helping to get things done faster) to go away and leave you to suffer without spectators.

11. The nephew in the household you have invaded (while his parents are in Hawaii and you are in the midst of the renovation) will have an accident while horsing around outside while having a Nerf warfare battle with your son, which necessitates the need of a late night trip to the E.R. for an x-ray on his hand. Thankfully this involves 'only' a contusion and no broken bones, even though your ornery husband decides to tell his sister by a trans-pacific cell phone call that it was a horrible break on the growth plates, and will need titanium pins and intensive physical therapy to restore use. She will groan with regret, ruing the moment she decided to take the trip, until her brother says, "I'm just kidding...it's only a bruise. He'll be better in a day or two with a pain reliever" to which she will reply, "You jerk", but in the same sentence thank him for taking care of her baby in her absence, because that's just the kind of family they are.

12. You will discover that your new neighbors love playing very very loud music at all hours of the day and night, the decibel levels of which will reverberate in your chest like the 3rd row tickets to a lame Stryper concert you went to as a teen, and that said neighbors will, with much profanity the following morning, blame you because the cops showed up to bust them for disturbing the peace at 3 am, all because you're the new kids on the block. (Not the NKOTB, but the new family in the 'hood.) And you will worry for the safety of your home and belongings and dog after leaving the house each night.

13. Your normally stalwart, brave guard-dog will exhibit bizarre and uncharacteristic behavior. Like tugging on the gate of the chain link fence with her teeth to try and open it and get out. Or like jumping in the car every time you open the doors as though to say, "Please, PLEASE don't leave me here by myself again!" until you realize that she is accustomed to viewing everything from the relative privacy afforded by wooden fences where she would spy through the gaps in the boards, but is now 'exposed' by chain link, and doesn't like it one. single. bit. And she will hover around you (because, after all, you are the only mama she can remember) every moment you spend at the new house working, literally dogging your every step. And you will have to speak to her in soothing tones to calm her down. And she will run to you with relief at your arrival each morning, and you will feel great guilt for not being able to do anything about it.

14. Your appliances will not be available for delivery for two full weeks after move in, and your kitchen things will all still be packed due to the renovation dust, effectively preventing you from cooking dinner in your home. (Darn).

15. Because of # 5 and #8 and #9, your renovation will drag on days longer than you anticipated, and you will find yourselves feeling rather homeless, dragging clothes around with you in tubs in the backs of your vehicles for convenience sake. This will be confirmed after one particularly pitiful incident in WalMart parking lot where you were seen in grubby work clothes, messy hair and without makeup on, mumbling about trying to find some clean clothes for your toddler son 'in there somewhere', and you will turn and notice disparging looks being cast your direction from the lady in the nearby car who just watched you change said son's diaper, and you will realize that folks think you are living in a van down by the river.