Endless Hell

I think there must be a curse on this house. There is always some home improvement activity going on. It never ends. They're patching and painting the walls--and it's been going on for weeks. How is this possible? I hate it here. We've had someone here working on the house at least once a week (with maybe a week off here and there) for over a year.

The morning I went into labor we had two f***ing morons installing a door in the master bathroom. At 9 a.m. I was pacing the hallway, doing my breathing exercises and listening to power tools whizzing at top volume. After 30 minutes of that we had to tell them to get the hell out. What made it extra annoying is that the genius who designed and started installing this sliding door had already been half-assedly (is that a word?) working on this project for a couple of weeks. Weeks! It was just a simple door that he had to get fancy with. This door was not finished until about a month after Simon was born. And you know what? It was horrible. It is horrible. It's the crappiest door in human history. It took months to finish. The genius tried to get us to pay him many thousands of dollars for it. We only asked for a regular, easy door. He got experimental with it and f***ed it up and had to restart from scratch, but he wanted us to pay him for all his time. Let me tell you: IT DOESN'T EVEN CLOSE ALL THE WAY! That's all a door has to do, right? This one gets stuck halfway and you have to coax it, and even then it doesn't fit flush against the other wall. Amazing!

We have these other geniuses now doing the walls and they get paint dust (from sanding) all over the place (even though they lay down tarps). I have a baby boy who loves to roam around and put things in his mouth. I don't want him eating paint dust. Also, there are so many paint splatters--on the wood floors, on wool rugs, on furniture. I want to kill these people. There is no end in sight. Some days they don't show up, and everything takes longer than you can imagine. They're working on the master bedroom today. I noticed that they have tracked white paint-dust footprints all through the house. WTF! They still have to do Simon's room. That'll probably take us into next year.

We keep thinking that they're almost done. That's why we haven't gotten someone else to do the work, but maybe we need to rethink this.

Before the walls, there was the Adventure of the Copper Pipes. Before that, the Mystery of the Uneven Floor, the epic Refinishing the Pool saga, the Fixing the Outdoor Tiles thriller, and many more tales of loud noises and disruption. Simon doesn't know a world without construction work. I get so tense sometimes when he's napping because I'm afraid a worker will wake Simon up. There were a few weeks when Simon slept while workers pounded on pipes under the house. I would tell them that my baby son was sleeping, but sometimes they were still loud.

Anyway, I absolutely hate it here right now. The place is a mess, and it's impossible to clean while the workers are mucking everything up. I keep thinking, "just one more day," but I know it's a lie...