101 Reasons NOT to Remodel Your Home

101 Reasons Not to Remodel Your Home

Remodeling Humor for the Lighthearted

1. It is less stressful and much cheaper not to.

2. Your kitchen was good enough in 1954, why mess with it?

3. The mill has stopped making the wood flooring you bought too little of last year and the boxes of it in your garage have mildewed anyway.

4. Walls are not meant to be taken down.

5. There are 26 layers of paint-wallpaper-paint that, if scraped off, would widen your bathroom by a foot and a half and disorient you at 3am.

5. You can simply decide that your almond appliances are just a pastel shade of stainless steel.

6. The eight foot high cement block wall you have wanted to build around your property will not increase its value.

7. Your neighbors will call the City on you, no matter what you do.

8. Adding kitchen and bath outlets will encourage the acquisition of embarrassing small appliances like sandwich fryers, dog vacuums, and portable electric bidets.

9. For any project large or small, you will have a boat-sized, rusted blue dumpster in your driveway for months, if not years.

10. Since they don’t get shipped, ever, you will come to believe that railings are highly over-rated.

11. Your contractor is waiting for a vacation until he starts your project.

12. Living without windows and doors for awhile.

13. If you simply throw away half your stuff, you’ll have twice as much room without further inconvenience.

14. There isn’t really any known way to make room for a pool table, or for a pool, where either do not naturally exist.

15. A Sunday morning outing to Café De Omelet vs. three to Home Depot.

16. You cannot really improve on a toilet enough to make it worth $3000.

17. Turrets are better left in the Middle Ages.

18. You will have to make hundreds of decisions, none of which really matters.

19. Everything to do with remodeling, every single possible item, is toxic.

20. The fumes will kill you, or with luck they will only destroy the creativity that got you started.

21. ……..? umm………….

In life, as in literature, you will run out. You will run out of flooring, you will run out of tile, you will run out of pvc pipe the size you need, you will run out of bricks, paint, drywall, washers, trim, rags, wire, shingles, shims, flashing, fencing, and sconce brackets and there will not be just one more squeeze of silicone nor one more rung on your ladder to lift you to the code-required heights a better, more expensive ladder might have.

So you will have to run out to get another, to get more. Sadly, but predictably, no matter what it is you need, the hardware store has also run out.

To avoid this running out—of material, enthusiasm, life-force, money and the will to awaken to the odor of sweating men to whom you are not related—please re-read from #1. In remodeling, everything has to be done twice.