He describes the renovations being done taking two years:
> A whole new roof, to start; now the building has a 50-year roof, which means it will almost certainly outlive me. The electricity was knob and tube and had to be redone. There was an outside retaining wall that had to be torn out and redone. The aforementioned balcony was actually not safe to be on; it was cantilevered out into space with no support and had a shin-high barrier that wouldn’t stop anyone from going over the side. That was fixed, and new floors and custom bookcases by a local artisan built in so I could have my library. The basement floor was redone; the kitchen space down there gutted and remodeled. We pulled up high-traffic industrial carpet glued to the sanctuary floor and reconditioned the hardwood floors underneath. New HVAC, and improved drainage for the maintenance room. The office and Sunday school room in the basement was turned into a guest suite. The structure was sealed against moisture and the walls were all replastered and repainted.
I live in a reasonably large city, and it took me much more than two years just to get some unsatisfactory work done on a couple of rooms. (Much of that time being trying to get the contractor to come finish up the work so I could finally give him money, an inducement which seemed to have startlingly little power.) I'd always thought that was just because I started peri- and post-pandemic, but Scalzi says that this work, too, was done during the pandemic, so that can't be it. I guess I'm just really bad at picking contractors.
> A whole new roof, to start; now the building has a 50-year roof, which means it will almost certainly outlive me. The electricity was knob and tube and had to be redone. There was an outside retaining wall that had to be torn out and redone. The aforementioned balcony was actually not safe to be on; it was cantilevered out into space with no support and had a shin-high barrier that wouldn’t stop anyone from going over the side. That was fixed, and new floors and custom bookcases by a local artisan built in so I could have my library. The basement floor was redone; the kitchen space down there gutted and remodeled. We pulled up high-traffic industrial carpet glued to the sanctuary floor and reconditioned the hardwood floors underneath. New HVAC, and improved drainage for the maintenance room. The office and Sunday school room in the basement was turned into a guest suite. The structure was sealed against moisture and the walls were all replastered and repainted.
I live in a reasonably large city, and it took me much more than two years just to get some unsatisfactory work done on a couple of rooms. (Much of that time being trying to get the contractor to come finish up the work so I could finally give him money, an inducement which seemed to have startlingly little power.) I'd always thought that was just because I started peri- and post-pandemic, but Scalzi says that this work, too, was done during the pandemic, so that can't be it. I guess I'm just really bad at picking contractors.