Slow Building Progress
It turns out, I’m not very patient.
Apparently, though, my old building that sits at the single stoplight in Pondera County must be.
Built in 1920 as a center for commerce throughout the region, it boasted an elevator, pneumatic tubes for sending messages throughout the three floors, bricks made from the clay dug onsite and massive compressors to run cold storage.
Then it became a furniture store for two generations.
Escalating energy costs combined with easy access to big box stores in Great Falls and online shrank this building’s influence little by little over a long time.
So I should not expect my remodeling project to happen overnight.
But I do.
The ground level has four thriving retail shops.
When I bought the building in 2021, the basement was cold and drafty and the upstairs was a concrete cavern with 14-foot ceilings, bricked in windows, a patchwork of sketchy electricity and corroded nonfunctioning plumbing.
Both floors were unusable.
But all I needed to do was knock out the bricks to replace them with real windows, insulate the concrete walls, install heating and plumbing, replace old fluorescent lights with new ones and make every one of the 21 nonfunctional rooms pretty and practical.
How hard could it be?
Then the septic system pooled in the basement.
A little jackhammering in the concrete floor revealed 100-year-old cast iron sewer lines cracked and crumbling.
A revamped septic line bypassed all of the old cast iron.
After that little blip, I figured we could knock out the rest of the renovations within a couple of months, four tops.
I hired an electrician, a plumber and two window installers.
The windows are 20 feet in the air so I borrowed a lift and bought a super cool chainsaw to cut out the window bricks.
The first sprayfoam company ghosted me for three months so I hired a different company.
All of the walls were insulated within a month.
The window guys began replacing windows, adding insulation batting and finishing each room with sheetrock.
Then the truck broke down.
The vintage dump truck is just one of a myriad of logistics to be worked out during a remodeling project.
The window guys borrowed a 1950s dump truck to toss bricks and garbage from the windows.
Every day, they string caution tape to block the sidewalk so nobody gets conked on the head with a flying brick.
I walk under the caution tape.
The elevator is 7 feet by 9 feet, which wouldn’t seem to be a limiting factor until a person needs a ladder that reaches a 14-foot ceiling.
Updating the plumbing seems simple to me; run new PVC through the holes made for old, galvanized pipe.
The plumber -- the expert -- seems to think it won’t be that simple.
He doesn’t tell me how to raise cows so I better not tell him how to run hot water and a toilet.
About once a week, I get frustrated by the slow progress.
About once a day, I get worried about the money that is going into this project.
Then one hot day, I put one hand on the old, uninsulated bricks and the other on a window that had just been installed.
The heat of the bricks burned my hand while the window was room temperature.
All of that insulation and those new windows are making a difference.
Then someone stopped me in the grocery store to compliment the new windows.
Someone else asked about renting office space.
My plan is progressing.
I just need to be patient.
Learning patience was never a part of my plan.
But plans don’t always turn out the way I expect them to turn out.