The Duplex Doesn't Care About My Deadlines

I bought my half of this duplex a few years back specifically because it was cheap and needed work, which felt like a smart plan for an architect, buying something I’d actually be qualified to fix myself instead of paying someone else to do it. What I underestimated, somehow, despite doing this professionally, is that an old house doesn’t care what order you’d like its problems to show up in. I had a whole sequence planned. The house had other ideas.

The plan, on paper, was kitchen first, since that’s the room that gets used daily and was the most obviously dated, original cabinets from whenever this place was last touched, probably decades ago. I got about three weekends into demo before the knob and tube wiring behind one wall made the decision for me that electrical was actually first, no negotiation, a code issue I couldn’t in good conscience leave half-exposed behind new cabinets. So electrical became the project, for months, while the kitchen sat gutted and unusable and I cooked out of a single hot plate on the dining room table like some kind of graduate student.

There’s a specific kind of humility in this that I don’t think I fully appreciated before I owned an old house myself. Professionally, I get to plan a renovation on paper, sequence it logically, present a phased schedule to a client who trusts that the sequence makes sense. My own house has made it very clear that the actual order of operations for an old building gets decided by whatever’s failing worst right now, not by whatever would be most satisfying to tackle first. The wiring didn’t care that I wanted a new kitchen. It just needed to stop being a fire hazard.

Devon asked me recently how the kitchen’s coming, with the specific tone of someone who’s asked that question enough times to know the answer’s probably going to be a little depressing. It’s not coming. It’s on hold behind a bathroom subfloor issue I found while I was in there for something else entirely, the kind of discovery that only happens once you’ve already opened a wall up for an unrelated reason and can suddenly see everything that’s actually going on underneath.

I don’t regret buying this place, even mid-renovation, mid-hot-plate-dinners, mid explaining to yet another person why the kitchen still doesn’t have real counters. There’s something genuinely satisfying about fixing a building with your own hands instead of just drawing instructions for someone else to follow. It’s just slower than I planned, in the exact way every renovation project is slower than planned, and I say that as someone whose entire job is telling other people how long their renovation will take.