Jul 7, 2016 3 min read

When you’re living in a house that’s under construction, you expect to find things out of place. Work boots on the piano bench are not unusual around here – nor are coffee mugs on the scaffold.

For the past several months, our house has been more of a work site than a home. The farmer and his son are scraping and painting the exterior of this big, old Victorian – a massive undertaking that, if we hired a company, would cost tens of thousands of dollars.

So, the house is caged in scaffolding. Lumber and windows and cans of paint are all around. And, oh, the spent caulking tubes. At the end of a long day of work, the empties are scattered under the scaffold like butts in a sand ashtray.

Anyone who lived through a home construction will tell you the truth. You never quite feel like you can relax. My friend and her large family lived in and through a major kitchen remodel; for three months she cooked in a microwave and washed the dishes in the laundry tub. That’s 90 days of chicken nuggets and frozen pizzas for dinner.

I haven’t moved out of my kitchen, but some days I feel the work encroaching. Most days there’s a Home Depot bag on the island counter. I move it to the sideboard. Paintbrushes are sometimes cleaned at the kitchen sink. A leg brace or sweatband rides a counter stool until someone moves it to the laundry.

This comes with having workers around. The farmer and his son work long hours in the hot sun. The only thing worse than spending a 90-degree afternoon on a scaffold painting a house is spending the time way up there with heat reflecting off of yellow paint.

Meanwhile, inside, I am biting my tongue. I see my job as mostly not whining about the mess and disruption. But there came a last straw.

One morning several weeks ago, I shuffled downstairs to the kitchen to make coffee. There, on the stove, was a hammer. It was sitting there like it owned the place – like it was a skillet or something.

How exactly did it get there? Was one of the workers hammering some wood when he got thirsty, came in for a glass of water, put the tool down and walked away? Was there something wrong with the stove that needed hammering, and the tool was left there as a convenience?

I’ve been through this before. When my son was a preschooler, he had a habit of pilfering objects from drawers and carting them off. I would find kitchen utensils in his toy box or in his bed. Once, when preparing for a dinner party, I couldn’t find my garlic press. I muttered awful things under my breath as I chopped the garlic by hand that night. Several days later I found the press on the hook of his toy tow truck.

That hammer on the stove was a breaking point for me. Rather than toss the hammer through the window, I calmly moved it to the back porch, announced I was leaving home for a few days, and drove off with my bike on the back of my car. When I returned home, refreshed and relaxed, the work boots were blocking the kitchen door. But the newly painted porch looked beautiful.

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