Apr 7, 2016 3 min read

For months now, the house has been shrink-wrapped in plastic. From the road, you see a cloudy wall encasing the front porch, obscuring all that makes our house so charming.

They call it curb appeal, and for most of the winter, the house didn’t have much of it. The swing, planters, soft wicker furniture – all those charming parts spent the winter stacked in a corner.

The plastic allowed the farmer to continue scraping, priming and painting the porch during the cold weather. Some days, the plastic alone wasn’t enough to keep the farmer warm, so he would open the front door to allow the household heat to waft out.

Anyone who has lived through – or worse, in – a home renovation knows what I’m about to say next. It’s misery. The only thing more plentiful than grumpy moods around here is dust. I start each morning with a symphony of throaty sneezes – loud enough to wake people; but by then the farmer/carpenter has already been up for hours, waiting until it was OK to turn on whatever power tool he needed that morning.

We added a room to the back of the house about 15 years ago, but we had the good sense to live elsewhere while the work was going on. In that case, walls were removed, leaving gaping holes all over. The kids were very young then, and I’m not sure we could have lived through that.

The project now is more of a facelift: new windows, new paint, new floors. When the farmer set out to replace the surface of the stairs to the third floor, he discovered the whole works was an eighth of an inch off kilter.

“Actually, the whole house is an eighth of an inch crooked,” he said. He is the sort who, if leveling the steps was not possible, would find a way to level the house.

The house was built circa 1898. Things were not straight back then. Nothing was kilter. I looked up that word to see where it came from: kilter has always meant straight. Urban Dictionary, the hipster version of Webster’s, defines off-kilter as “the state of being weird, often the result of staying up extremely late, smoking many cigarettes and having random dance parties.”

That hipster definition is a level or two above my urban cool pay grade. But let me tell you, when you are renovating a house, there is none of that: we are so tired we’re in bed by nine; there are no dance parties because every horizontal space has a tool resting on it; and we don’t smoke, but if we did we’d need something stronger than regular cigarettes.

In fact, the only part of that urban definition that applies to us is weird. The renovation is making us cranky, dust-covered, tired and poor. Do you know what it costs to install 30 new windows?

The house, on the other hand, is looking better every day. The shrinkwrap is about to come off; when it does, we shall reveal a handsome new porch. When all this seasonably inappropriate snow finally moves on, we’ll hook up the porch swing. Somewhere high up on the third floor, the work of putting floors and windows back to kilter will continue.

I’ll be on the swing, staying out of it.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.