There comes a time when a suburbanite looks at a perfectly functional roof and decides it needs to be replaced.
Not just reshingled. Replaced. And the room under it, too. Earlier this year, my family concluded that our sunroom was no good.
It worked perfectly well as a sunroom. It was a room that got lots of sun. But somehow it had slid from our good graces. It deserved the wrecking ball.
Getting municipal approval to replace a sunroom only takes 87 million years.
Fortunately, the amoebae who lived in the primeval mud where my house now stands applied early. I barely had to wait a few months before the approval papers arrived.
That’s when the tough part ended and the fun part began. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
The architects got architecting. The contractors began contracting. And I watched the sum in my bank account go down and down and down.
“We’re making great progress,” the architect declared a week or two later. He gestured at a drawing. “We’re actually moving in record time.”
“That’s great,” I said, and took a few steps back to admire the house. “When are you gonna get started?”
A week later, I woke up out of a work meeting to a noise that sounded like someone tearing great chunks out of my house. The party had started after all.
I poked my head out the window and nearly got hit by a falling shingle. “Hey!” I yelled. “Is that normal?”
The head builder gave me a thumbs-up and told me to get back to my work. Well, not so much told me as dropped a hammer. That got me inside real quick.
I sat back down at my desk and tried not to look out the window. But my eyes kept turning away from my computer.
Insulation blew past like snow, if snow was pink and dusty and… well, insulation-like.
Every few minutes, a stack of shingles smashed on the concrete walk outside my front door.
Once a roofer plummeted past. I leaped for the window again, backpedaled, then finally made up my mind. With my eyes nearly screwed shut, I leaned over the sill and looked down.
The roofer revolved in a slow circle below me. He was wearing a safety harness. He gave me a friendly wave as his friends hauled him back up.
His boots rose past my window and started clumping around above me again. I crawled to my desk and tried not to keel over from anxiety.
The hammering and smashing and falling and crashing continued for weeks. I signed checks like I was born to do so.
Eventually I heard boots coming up the stairs instead of tap dancing on the roof. It was the contractor. The sunroom was finished.
I shot outside to take a look. He was right. The old room had deserved destruction. The new room shone. It looked fresh and clean and pretty.
I went back inside to write out the last check and stopped short. The contractor saw what I was looking at.
“Yeah, we’re only allowed to take care of the outside, so the inside might look a bit raw,” he admitted. “Some people like the fact that you can see the rafters. Gives it a rustic vibe.”
I told him exactly what I thought of rustic vibes.
The guy took it in good humor. Besides, he said, there was no need to worry.
Once I got municipal approval, I could call his cousin, the interior decorator.
Copyright 2024 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
