return to zero
I bought a house from a wholesaler, most of y’all know that. I did it because I’m trying to be my own sugar daddy. I want to have enough income from property/air b&b income that I can try my hand at being an artist in Chicago without the suffocating existential money dread of being a broke loser at 40.
Good plan, hard to execute. I’m not handy, never have been, still don’t feel handy. I only can feel how much I’ve learned when I get asked to help on a friend’s project, thats when I realize that I’ve been learning something. I digress.
Part of this experience with renovation is about stripping things down.
Every house is a nest of decisions.
Some of them carefully made and forward thinking, some very clearly were rushed through to appease someone else or just to buy time.
If you work on a house long enough, you become suspicious of everything. And you should be, lots of people don’t know what they are doing, and even good work will one day fail. Sometimes the first step is to pull up everything that was done before.
My kitchen floor is such an example. Its basically a seven layer bean dip of shitty linoleum and backer board and carpentry staples and adhesives, 5 levels deep. I could smell moisture under the floor, and I needed to know how bad it was. At one level, I had to hand pull about 200 staples out of the floor in order to dislodge it.
Even though this is a lot of work, I like it. I like knowing how bad it is. Once I see the subfloor, I can rest assured that whatever we build from here on out will be on sure footing.
I call this process returning to zero.
When things go bad, the natural tendency is to not look. I know I am like that. I avoid knowing all the time. I am trying to shield my psyche from pain. But there is an intense relief in quantifying the bad. In knowing exactly how bad something is, to the ounce. To the penny. Because once you have measured the bad, you know exactly how much good it will take to overcome it.
I hope for you that you find a way to return things to zero, to estimate the down side, and start right away on building the upside.