Three Week Job Hats

Every renovation has the same plot. There is a number, and there is a date, and both of them are offered with total confidence by a person who has done this many times before. Then something is opened up, and what is behind it is not what anybody expected, and the number and the date quietly become historical documents. The phrase that does the most damage is the friendliest one: while we're in there. It always makes sense. It is always cheaper now than later. It is also how a bathroom becomes a bathroom and a hallway, and how March becomes June. Nobody is lying — that is the genuinely funny part. Everyone involved is acting in good faith and the project expands anyway, because that is what projects do. These are written from the homeowner's side and pointed at the situation, never at the contractor. A hat that insults the person currently holding your plumbing is not a hat anyone can wear, and it would not be funny even if it were. The comedy is in the vocabulary — the quote, the permit, the thing behind the drywall — which anybody who has lived through it can recite from memory.