Keeping Up With the Machine

The last 11 days have been a marathon of 10 hour working days. It is amazing to me that my body is so much less capable than it was even 4 years ago. Our contractor has started every day at 8 am, and we work alongside him until he leaves at 6:30 pm. He is a machine. I am not.

I am focused and stay steady at my work, but I hit a brick wall around 4:30 and that is when the crabby me bears her ugly head. My joints hurt, by back aches, my hands and shoulders are in pain, and by 6 pm I am literally dragging my body up the stairs.

Renovating an entire house in two months has been challenging to say the least. Early on the issue was working with “numb nuts” (our pet name for the contractor that literally did EVERYTHING wrong), and now the difficulty is keeping up with Jonathan from Calgary: our contractor is a machine. He is good. He is fast. He does not stop working for one second in a 10 hour day. I do not think he pees…and we are his “helpers” so we have to keep up. He has come a long way to help us out, and we have to lift, and bend and carry and clean and paint and sand until we are exhausted.

Our basement suite is almost done – I have a few minor decorative things to do this winter, but it is lovely and livable. The ensuite upstairs (which used to be our third bedroom) is nearly complete too: I just have to hang the light fixtures and paint. Our kitchen is totally torn apart right now and we are basically living in a hell hole. There is no sink, no stove. Cardboard is taped on the floor, but somehow the drywall dust always finds a way under it to be ground into the new flooring. There is sawdust on our dishes giving new meaning to the words dirty dishes!

I woke up at 3am - again - last night, unable to sleep and when I tried to go to the couch to drink some sleepy-time tea I almost killed myself on a table saw, only to recover and sit down on a stack of wall tile piled on the couch. Pizza and bagged salad is on the menu more often than I like to admit. Stephane is overwhelmed by the chaos but he is plugging on, trying to hide his misery. He works hard and his body is in revolt – unused to hard physical labour and long days.



I am writing this in the bathtub -the only part of our home that is not torn apart: It was that or sit on the toilet, so the hot water was an easy choice. The tub is my refuge. It is where I soak my weary bones in the morning - to limber up for my long day - and where I eat my supper at night, while soaking my wearing bones again. By Wednesday next week I will be soaking in my new, beautiful deep, luxurious bathtub. For now though, my BBQ’d smokey is on the edge of the tub beside my laptop, laying unappetizing beside my pickle. Another wonderful meal. Another exhausting day.