An idealist and pragmatist walk into a bar ....

I've been pretty quiet while this project has been incubating over the last few months. It has been hard to balance the possibilities of the house with the realities, especially considering that Chai and I respectively embody these competing ideals. The process has not been easy on our relationship. From the get go, I advocated for limiting the design effort to simply the things that needed to be done to get the place habitable. But Chai pointed out (rightly so) that we could waste a lot of time and money working piecemeal if we didn't have a vision of how we'd ultimately like it to look so that we can prioritize work and avoid paying for doing things twice.

The problems started when it came time to pare the list back down to something we could afford.
After lovingly and painstakingly designing and redesigning the renovation every day for months, Chai had a hard time imagining living in anything less than the full version she had arrived at. On the other hand, I (who left all the grunt work to her and continued my life as usual for the past few months) always saw as completely optional things like making sure the dining room doorway lined up with the kitchen island and the window frame, even if it meant moving an interior wall. My attraction to this house had less to do with aesthetics and more to do with getting more space, being among great neighbors, and being mortgage free within a year or two.

Suddenly, I was getting only two out of three.

A few years ago, when Chai and I decided to tie our futures together, she had to accept that I will always surround myself with dogs in my home, and I had to accept that every time we moved, she would have to renovate the new place. She had never had a dog as a pet and had come from a culture that believed that the last place they belonged was in the home, much less on the bed. Because I knew her tastes were refined and my tolerance for financial risk was low, I was scared that we'd end up in a conflict over the costs and inconvenience of any renovation. We talked about it a lot. Eventually, she reassured me that she felt confident we could work it out when the time came. And, shortly thereafter she became such a dog lover that she asked to add a second one to our little family. So, I relaxed about the whole thing.

Still, I was going to need some external confirmation as to just how much a project like this could cost. So, when we bought the place, we had our realtor (who has also done his own home improvement), our home inspector, and a general contractor (who had previously been inside the place) give us ballpark estimates on what it would cost to get the place habitable. We knew there was no kitchen and no furnace. We knew there was damage in the back wall (but perhaps not the extent of it). We knew the wiring and plumbing needed updating. I had never done this kind of renovation before and have no idea what these things cost, especially if I'm not doing the labor. So, you could have told me $75K or $175K, and I would have believed you. But $75K would put me within reach of the #3 criterion on my list. $175K would not.

Our three guys all said that $75K seemed about right to get it habitable.  Now, Chai (an architect who has done multiple renovations before) never believed for a minute that it would end up costing us that little. And while I valued her input, I was so aware of a key difference in the way we think about things that I didn't know what an appropriate middle ground might be. (For those of you that know Jungian types or Myers Briggs, I'm a "J" and she's a "P".) As a largely stick-to-your-story literalist, I find her natural process of trying on various opinions over a series of weeks in order to reach a conclusion increasingly weakens my confidence in each of her new assertions. Also, we don't have much common vocabulary on these things. For example, my definition of "habitable" starts slightly above "not sucking as much as camping" and hers isn't reached until well above "finishes that are not so mismatched that they won't cause her eyeballs to twitch in horror".


So, when the estimates started rolling in, I started breathing into a bag.

Coming up ... a break down of the costs and just how hard it is to throw work at contractors in Detroit.