All
of us have seen those stress test things in the papers from time to
time. You know those that tell you if you lose your job, it’s 15
points. Heath problems are another 25 points. If you have to move
from one place to another it can crank your stress index up another
50 points. Your mother in law moving in with you? Well, that’ll blow
your stress budget up at least another 100 points higher. I’ve done
these for years and I’m always over the limit by a factor of at
least 2.
According
to their charts I should be either dead or in an asylum somewhere. I
know there are some folks that would agree with the latter. Maybe
even the former. But, I’m not dead nor am I locked away anywhere. I
have said this before and I’ll say it again, I believe there are
some of us that attract stress and can deal with it more than
others. I do know that there is one item that is a major stress
buster for all, including me and that’s remodeling your house while
you are living in it. Trust me, I know this one first hand since
I’ve been living it for the past 6 months.
We’re
so pressed for room; our relationships have gone from suicidal to
homicidal. If this column doesn’t appear in the next week or so,
send help. I may have been buried in the driveway. We started a
project to turn our garage into an office for me and build a new
garage for the cars. Sounds simple, but just wait. By the time we
got through you might have thought this was some government project
or something. Now, for those of you that have never gone through the
agony of remodeling, let me explain a couple of things. First off,
it doesn’t go at the same pace as getting a new house built. In
fact, they are building a new house up the street from me and I’ll
bet they’ll be finished before we are. Contractors that do
remodeling have a different timetable and a different code to work
under than guys building new houses. They’ll tell you that it’s
difficult to bid on a remodel job since they don’t really know what
to expect and what all needs to be done until they get the old stuff
torn out and can take a look at everything. Some walls look good on
the outside, but have rotten boards and wiring on the inside. I
expect they bid their jobs higher to start just to compensate for
these factors. Whatever.
Anyway,
here we start off in September of last year and now we are into
March. Seven months later and we’ re about to finish. We had the
winter to endure, the monsoons and delays in sub contractors, late
materials, flu, deaths, marriages, graduations, car wrecks,
jail time, food poisoning, and a number of other delay causing
problems that I can’t recall since my brain is in the numb stage at
this point. Just let it be known that if you are expecting to finish
on time, you ‘re expecting too much. It doesn’t work that way. The
contractor always has other projects going on at the same time. You
didn’t think you were his only customer, did you? This causes him to
use what I call "Contractors license".
The
way this works is about the same way as poetic license does for
writers. We can alter the facts to suit us, as we need to within the
framework of our own conscience. So can the contractor. When you’re
expecting the painters to show up and paint one morning, the
contractor may call you and tell you that Fred or Juan or whoever
came down with Ebola and won’t be in for a couple of days, so the
painting is now scheduled for the end of the week. The next week,
the painters will show up, but the rock guys putting in the
sidewalks were all put in jail and won’t be out for another few
days, so that part is pushed back to the week after next since they
have to go to some other job when they get out.
At
first you get hacked over this stuff, but soon you realize there
isn’t much you can do about it, so you just learn to grin and bear
it and go on. Of course, what else can you do? You’ve already paid
this guy X amount of dollars and he hasn’t finished, so if you fire
him and go out and find someone else, how much more can you spend?
Or better put, how much more can you afford to spend? No, I think
the best way to handle this is to consider it a work in progress and
just be patient. It’ll be over soon, and things will be back to
normal before too much longer. Or as normal as can be expected
around our house.
As
I’ve said before, a day without stress is like a day without
sunshine. Comments? www.pearyperry.compperry@austin.rr.com
