20/2025: The accidents we do not see

Image © Jose 2025

When we decided we would do the renovation we are doing in this house, and we decided to work with a general contractor to do the job because we quickly understood we couldn’t do it ourselves, we wondered for a while if we could sell the place where we were and move into the new house while it was undergoing renovation. We were foolishly thinking we’d live in one area while the renovation was going on in another, and we’d move around depending on where the areas were finished. Easy, right? I’m glad we heard a few voices telling us this wouldn’t work, the loudest of them all, the general contractor.

Looking back, we are happy we didn’t do this. It would have been chaotic, stressful, noisy, dirty, crazy for almost four months. I have the distinct feeling we wouldn’t have survived it, as individuals and as a couple. There’s a big chance we would have killed the general contractor, or the other way around. Now that we have moved in, there are things still happening, renovations in the living room and things on that rather large punch list everyone has when they move in, so every single weekday we have a flurry of contractors coming in and out, finishing jobs, and sometimes creating mayhem while they do.

One of the things we have been starkly reminded of is that many things happen while a renovation is going on, and because we are not in place, we will never know. It’s like the old question: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, has the tree really fallen? In this case, we have not been here, and we have no clue how many trees have fallen. And they most certainly have, if we look at the things that have happened in these last weeks since we moved in. From plumbing issues that have caused water falling from a nicely finished and painted ceiling, to lack of coordination between the electrician, the plumber and the cement folks leading to an almost fiasco and potential redoing of something expensive – this is what happens during a renovation. And when we see how unfazed the contractors are with these so-called incidents, we understand that this happens, and people solve the issues and proceed. So, while in this case when we paint that ceiling again we will still remember the water falling from it, all the other incidents are like fallen trees in a distant forest, we will have no clue, and perhaps this is better.

Accidents happen, and they happen in every domain, every profession, and independently of the expertise of those that are impacted by them. While a young trainee may encounter more accidents than a seasoned professional, the young professional might make mistakes and encounter accidents that are a result of training on the job. But seasoned professionals make mistakes out of other traits, sometimes because they are overconfident, sometimes because they try something different. One could say these accidents are happening at our expense, in our house, but I am doing things in the house now and I know where I had to do a couple of holes in the wall because the first one was misaligned. I’m glad that shelf is wide enough that covers it.

This old house has many hidden accidents, and sometimes not even accidents but simply choices, one would say by design. The carriage house was built in 1862, the family that lived here before pulled up to the house in 1966, so it has had many lives, many layers of use and misuse, many hidden accidents, or simply many signs of a life well lived, like scars in a person. The previous owner was frugal, and he was a tinkerer, so we find many areas of the house that reflect this approach. In some cases, they were done 50 years ago and lasted this long. Now we are creating a list of happy accidents, mistakes – some we know and some we don’t – another layer of history to this house that we are slowly starting to feel like home.