August Update!

My dad would say something here about best laid plans and all that. We obviously haven’t been able to keep this blog updated like we’d hoped. Honestly friends, 2023 has been a year like no other in my life. We are on the wildest of roller coasters and while we’re super excited and fortunate to be on this ride, good lord we’re ready to get off for a bit and find some stability. We are very close though, and there is a massive amount of progress to chat about.

The roofs (rooves?)

Roofs sounds wrong. Rooves looks wrong… The internet says it’s roofs so we’ll go with that and maybe you learned something.

The two roofs have proved to be the most expensive and stressful elements of this whole dang project. But guess what? They’re both 100% done and paid for! We have two solid, functional, watertight roofs that will last (had better last) til we’re 70. The flat roof ended up taking 2 months start to finish. They got the job done eventually but there was some significant teeth-pulling involved. We took tremendous joy in hiring a different company to do the other roof, and they finished in 2 days. Two days! To be fair, comparing the two projects is definitely apples and oranges, but I don’t care. The first company was horrendous and the second company was just grand.

Our reward for finishing the roofs was a wonderfully pleasant evening spent with new friends watching the fireworks for Bellows Falls’ Old Home Days. They set them off directly in front of our buildings and it was truly spectacular. And we had the best seats in the house.

Handing over the reins

Back to business. We actually liked the second company so much we hired them to take over the rest of the construction on both buildings. We were starting to get into projects that we just don’t have the experience to take on ourselves. Hiring a builder was perhaps overdue, but for the first time we feel like we might actually be able to get this thing done. In the 4 or 5 weeks the new builders have been around:

they replaced the roof on #92,
tore down and rebuilt 30ish feet of exterior wall in #92, which included re-siding it,
framed out the new salon’s bathroom and back room,
removed much of the balcony above Erica’s future work station in #92,
drywalled #94.

All of that and we still haven’t needed to pay them as much as the cost of the flat roof…. Don’t buy a building with a flat roof, kids. Just say no.

s-TREE-t Fighter

Okay look, it was either Tree Fighter or Tree-Pain, and I don’t know how many of you know who T-Pain is.

We got a ton of trees around the buildings removed. The improvement is mind-blowing and none of the pictures I’ve taken really does it justice. The space has been opened up and the buildings just look bigger and cleaner, and there’s so much more sun. It’s quite remarkable.

Unfortunately, we also had a really negative experience with the company that removed the trees. Without going into it too much, a tree fell while they were there and violently ripped the power line off of #94. No one was hurt thankfully, but naturally, the tree people refused to take responsibility and wouldn’t pay to get it fixed. Their argument was that the tree “originated outside the scope of work,” which was 10 feet from the building, and therefore not their job or responsibility. Erica unleashed on these guys, arguing that we hired them to simply remove trees that posed a threat to our buildings, not remove trees within 10 feet of the buildings. The 10 foot thing was their idea. Obviously, they failed to do what we hired them to do. Erica won that battle, and I sent them the bill for the repairs last week :) KO!

We also started painting the outside of #94 in May. We haven’t been able to paint much since, due to a combination of endless rain, competing with builders for space and the fact that we were still living half-time in Boston. We should be able to finish in the next few weeks, though.

“Why?” you ask? Because we moved up to NH for good on Wednesday! Both our jobs in Boston ended this week, leaving us free to dedicate 100% of our time and energy (what’s left of it, anyway) to finishing our renovations in Vermont and making New Hampshire our home. I should also now have more time to write and update the blog. I’d be wise to not promise anything and you’d be wise to not hold your breath. But I will do my best. I will be updating the gallery today as well.