Psychological study

Reactions to living through massive reno. Match family member to number.

1. Loving all the processed foods, highly, and somewhat surprisingly put off by the chaos.

2. Excited by the chaos, hating the bad food, secretly enjoying the relief of not being able to prepare proper dinner.  

3. Ignoring the chaos, missing healthy food. Definitely not liking the abundance of kitchen talk.

4. Hating every aspect.

Living room - currently serving as dining room, living room, kitchen, mud room, hallway.

I'm kind of surprised by our reactions to living through all this chaos. The mess and mayhem don't really bother me all that much, and having our floors covered with cardboard and plastic has some advantages in the winter. I may implement it next year!  However with no end in sight this dorm-style living is getting old really quickly. The other day I watched a friend take some fairly straightforward roasted tomatoes out of the oven and had a huge pang of jealousy or regret or longing or some odd emotion for the ability to create healthy nourishment for my family. I didn't actually want to eat the tomatoes, or even serve the tomatoes, I wanted to create them. I guess as much as I deride needing to cook dinner every night and seemingly constantly feed people every moment that I'm home, there is a part of me that misses the creative and maternal alchemy that is cooking with fresh food.

I'm also really not enjoying my contractor coming up with some new cost every time I blink. When people describe how stressful living through a renovation is, or when tv shows show homeowners melting down out about rising costs, I didn't quite realize what that stress felt like. It's the feeling when you take your car in to be fixed and have no idea if the mechanic is lying to you or not, or if you should sell the car and buy a new one because you can't predict what will break in the future. It's that, "I really don't want to be ripped off" rising anger but with much bigger numbers and every day for weeks and months on end.

Dave is much more thoroughly and deeply agitated by the huge chaotic mess we live in, and is also coming in and out of the details of the contract so is even more plagued by irritation over the seemingly daily increased costs.

And the kids, who I didn't even think that much about when planning this, are out of sorts and annoyed. Alex is really hating having everything asunder, and Natasha is definitely missing some real home cooking, and not enjoying straining for my attention. 

Future kitchen with temporary sink.

We made matters worse by enlarging the back mudroom project. This of course added several weeks to the torture project. More about that in the next post.