A wise man said (and grandpa Wendell reminded us) that renovations end up taking twice as long and costing twice as much money. This is true.
We’re now about two weeks into our kitchen renovations. We’ve hauled more than 300 kilograms of waste to the dump. We’ve stripped the room to the walls and have hired a good, licensed electrician to take a look at the frankly interesting wiring we’ve discovered in the kitchen walls and make sure everything is up to code. With luck, we will have new flooring installed today.
The electricity work is the largest expense by far, and unavoidable, because we don’t want the house to burn down, but it is expanding the renovation to other parts of the house. New sockets mean new circuits, and we’ve just learned that the panel is (a) full and (b) borderline obsolete, so we’re paying for a new one. This, of course, gets Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro involved, so they end up coming over and having a say about how our electrics enter into our house.
Long story short, the Hydro meter, which was in our back yard behind a fence, now has to be in the front yard side of the fence. Our choices are to move a section of the fence, or move the meter. The electricians assure us: you do not want to move the meter.
So, we’re moving the fence.
Fortunately, it’s only a small section of fence. It should be an easy job, allowing us to reuse the materials, and it would be nice to get a proper latch on the thing so we can open it more easily. But, still, when we set out to do this kitchen renovation, I did not expect it to involve moving a fence.
Ah, well.
Anyway, thanks again to the grandparents who have contributed lots of labour moving, washing, painting and more. There’s a reason why renovations are expensive when you have a contractor do it all.