Before and After

It has begun.

When I walked into my home after work today, I was met with two smells: chlorine, and that "old house being worked on" smell.

The chlorine was from the basement: my landlord hit the basement floor with bleach, to halt the growth of mold after the flooding we had a couple of weeks ago.

The other smell is one I've smelled when walking by a building that's being torn down, or when walls are torn out in a renovation. It's a combination of dust, mold, rot and god-knows-what.

We've gone from this:





To this:





And from this:



To this:





Where did all that stuff go? Right here:



That's our back porch.

There's also a pile of stuff under a tarp in our backyard of soaked stuff I missed when clearing out the basement. My landlord said it included some yearbooks-- probably mine. It was weird-- it didn't bother me much. I didn't look at them much these days-- that's why they were downstairs.

Kim is having a lot harder time with the disruption. I think that it is because I worked construction when I was younger. I'm used to being in a house that's all torn up.

I wonder, too, how much the disruption in my life ten years ago plays into it. When my first wife asked for a divorce ten years ago (while I was fighting an old girlfriend over custody of my son), I moved three times in a year-- and that does not include the couple of nights I slept in my car, the nights Adam and I spent in my parents' living room or the times I stayed at my friend Mark's house. After having dealt with that tumult, having a torn up kitchen and bathroom seems trivial.

In any event, the bathroom is supposed to be finished quickly-- in less than two weeks. The kitchen will take longer, but today was the worst of it.