If you’ve been reading my blog or my Facebook page, you might know that we have been restoring our rental, a duplex attached to our home. It’s just off the beach at the end of a dead end street, and the only long-term rental that I know of locally.

Just now we’ve been at work on the downstairs unit. Renting long term makes it possible for us to afford to care for the property and pay taxes. It’s why my grandfather first constructed the building in the mid-1930s. My family had a summer house then, dating back to 1911. We’d hoped to replace our dysfunctional garage door this year and take a few days on a vacation, but life had other plans.

To say the work we are doing is necessary would be accurate, but there is also an emotional element. I have vivid memories of the building from earliest childhood. My parents brought my brother and I here and we stayed in the rentals, usually upstairs. In 1984, we lived in this actual downstairs unit for six months (including Christmas) with our preschool sons, six dogs, and a litter of puppies. After that, I redid everything and my mother lived there while the house I designed for her and worked on was being built. I laid sub flooring in her new house, tiled the bathroom floor, wainscoting, and tub surround, the entry, and the kitchen backsplash. I installed her closet fittings and painted.

All this to say that I have worked on homes before. I have hung sheetrock, built bookshelves, and painted walls and painted patterns on floors and applied “Swedish finish.” I have pulled wire for an electrician [badly] and soldered pipe, hung fixtures and blinds and curtains and closets. I hoped I was completely done doing those things, but alas.

Everything filthy was gutted, everything damaged is repaired, everything make-do was up-graded. We scrubbed and stripped and painted and rewired and repaired. I took the kitchen cabinets apart and rebuilt with the original vintage (in less than ten years it will qualify as “antique”) hardware.

We’ve been working on repairs for four months. I tried to complete at least two tasks each day. Sometimes nine. One morning earlier this week, I patched [the last] hole in a wall, primed repairs, installed a closet rack and pole, and Gary tore out the work he’d done the day before because he found a leak over the shower. The plumber came that afternoon to make the repair. [Our recent tenant, though we remain fond of him, left a disaster. Some of this is ordinary maintenance, but more was outright careless damage and neglect.]

Above left, the old range as it was left (it had been new), and this is only what showed. right the mug cupboard. I stripped and refinished the hinges and latch and the fir ply face.

Gary, above at left, dressed to enter the apartment. It really was that bad. He scrubbed ceilings, walls, and floors, even after we filled two truckloads and two dumpsters. We sold nothing, but were able to give some items left behind, to charity, once Gary had cleaned them. He pulled the toilet and scrubbed it four times! He did most of that before he let me into the unit. I did not cry. It was worse than anything I’ve ever done, and I cleaned my aunt’s house where her body had been for several days before it was found. [Mom and I hired crime-scene cleaners.] At right, our escape to the Portland Rose Garden.

“We knew this was coming,” Gary said. “We just didn’t know it would be this bad.”

At left, this photo was taken after Gary began cleaning the kitchen; at right, floor and walls and cabinets repainted; hardware stripped and repaired; drawers cleaned, refaced, and working; but before the new lighting was installed.

I hung a small clock in the kitchen where there was always a clock, and like everything, this required some fiddling. Putting the clock in the kitchen made me smile. I think it was the first time since we began last year on this project.

At left, above, the bathroom floor is filthier than it looks, and that is a shattered mirror, shards of glass on the carpet outside the bath. Another mirror and other glass shattered throughout the apartment, not to mention the spills—other reasons we pulled the vinyl and all the flooring and carpet throughout and tossed it. All the surfaces were scrubbed, sanitized, and repainted. There were many holes in the walls, mostly small but six large enough to catch a fist, and gouges and grease marks we could not account for at all.

At right, the bath in progress—I just painted the floor but it won’t be that shiny once it has the second coat and dries. The repurposed door salvaged from a tear-down of my grandfather’s shop across the street. It’s on a “barn door” track. The inside of the door is painted pure white, but I preserved the patina on the outside—filling, sanding, using a thin wash of gray, and two coats of sealer. It’s meant to tone in to the blinds I hung yesterday. All the base trim will be repainted but is not yet in place. The window and base trim in the bath is new because the window had been left open year around and it was destroyed.

I still have a list, but it finally has pretty much everything on it, and it’s mostly painting, hanging, nailing in place. I need two or three coats of white on the baseboards, at least another coat of paint on the bedroom floor (I’m hand-brushing) and two coats on the living room floor. I ordered a new cutting board for the slot intended to hold a cutting board in the kitchen and it arrived this morning and it fits! A rack over the stove and another in the bathroom are supposed to be here tomorrow. Vintage porcelain towel rack and TP holder are in Portland and we’ll pick them up next weekend. I know I should brush on a fourth coat of white on the pantry shelves—a fourth coat!—but Jeremy said they looked good when he came to work on the bathroom door. The ceiling needs to go in the shower and install the shower curtain rod—odds and ends like that. I have a list of seventeen things still to do…

We thought we were done renovating. I thought I was done. When I recoated the toxic finish on the living room floor of our house a few years ago—fully geared with a breather and all—I swore I was done. On hands and knees scrubbing and painting and running around looking for parts? I thought I was done. But here we are. Life never goes quite the way we planned. There have been times I’ve been grateful for that. I’m trying to think of an example… surely…