Better Than New by Nicole Curtis

Author:Nicole Curtis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Artisan
Published: 2016-09-20T18:24:29+00:00

Adam and me, working late into the night.

There was also a deceptively large amount of work that needed to be done. Reporters who interviewed me and profiled Case would later say that what we did to the house were “cosmetic repairs,” and in a sense they were right. There wasn’t any serious structural damage. But the cosmetic damage was the most extreme I had ever seen. The water damage alone was appalling. Wood floors were warped throughout the house. Most of the walls had severe cracks and ugly black-and-gray water stains. The furnace needed to be replaced. The mouse infestation had, at one time, been so bad that mice had worn a track in the carpeting all around the perimeter of a room. I could have just torn everything out, but I wanted to save the exquisite wood moldings and woodwork throughout the house. It’s what gave Case most of its charm. Each of these problems, taken on its own, wasn’t especially troublesome. But add all of them together and I was facing a lot more work than I had anticipated.

I also underestimated what working in St. Paul would mean. I was so used to commuting just a few minutes to a job site—on Dollar, I’d often ridden to the house on my Vespa—that I was shocked to see how much the forty-minute commute to Case ate into my daily schedule. Just when I’d get into the middle of tearing out some stinky, ruined mess, I’d have to knock off to be home for Ethan. By the time I made it back to the house, it would be pitch black and freezing cold.

The actual work was, fortunately, straightforward. The floors in almost every room had buckled so badly that individual oak strips were “tented” and had to be cut out and replaced. We began painting the outside of the house, but then it started snowing, so we switched gears and worked room by room, repairing plaster walls, and—my favorite—stripping woodwork. (In this episode, I referenced one of my best tricks: stripper in a can. Which led me to discover the sophomoric attitude of my viewers. There is now no end to stripper-in-a-can references.) Then there was the kitchen.

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