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The renovation of the Brilliants’ Chevy Chase farmhouse
is nearly complete. Maybe that’s why the waiting seems harder than ever and
the frustrations more acute
By Sarah Pekkanen
Jenny Brilliant stood in the middle of her Chevy Chase
home, looking at the chaos surrounding her: Nails and scraps of wood littered
her front porch. Buckets of joint compound and drywall adhesive filled a corner
of her living room, and an empty soda bottle decorated its windowsill. Her
front yard held a port-a-john, and the house didn’t have electricity or plumbing.
How was it possible, Jenny wondered, that in just two months, this muddy
construction site would be transformed into a glorious, light-filled home?
Jenny sighed, cleared some debris from the hearth of her family room fireplace—or,
more accurately, the hollow space that will become her family room fireplace—and
sat down. “I’m suffering from this,” Jenny said quietly as a plasterer walked
by, looking like a lost circus performer on the stilts that enabled him to
reach the almost 10-foot-high ceilings. “I’m feeling a sense of frustration.”
Eight months after beginning the massive renovation of their 100-year-old
home, the Brilliant family’s nerves are stretched tight. Jenny, by nature
an optimist, keeps telling herself to look at the positives: The project is
coming in within 1 percent of the $600,000-plus budget estimated by Prill Construction—a rare feat in the construction business.
Plus everyone working on her home—from project manager Paul Connolly to Damian
Clark, a subcontractor who helped tear down her old screen porch and is now
helping rebuild the home’s interior—has been professional and pleasant to
work with.
Even when Jenny and her husband, Myron, were told the project was running
behind schedule and that they wouldn’t be able to move home until Oct. 15—rather
than the originally planned date of Sept. 1—they took the news calmly.
But on this particular August morning, Jenny’s sunny disposition—which has
carried her through countless mornings of battling traffic and countless hours
of searching for bathroom fixtures, tiles and wood flooring—has vanished.
Jenny came by the house today hoping to see her new wood floors, which were
supposed to have been delivered a day ago. But the floors are nowhere in sight.
Jenny started imagining what the delay could mean: Since the floors need a
week to acclimate inside the house before they’re installed, wouldn’t this
hold up installation of her kitchen cabinets—which, at that precise moment,
were stacked floor-to-ceiling in the living room of Jenny’s parents’ home?
How was Jenny going to break the news to her parents that they couldn’t use
their living room any time soon?
Just then, the front screen door of the Brilliants’ home opened and a man
clutching a large Starbucks cup walked in. Jimmy Lawson began working with
Prill Construction as a project supervisor this
summer, and it’s clear he has shown up today in the nick of time.
Jenny immediately began asking him questions: “The floors aren’t here?”
“The floors are coming today,” Lawson said, instinctively grasping that soothing
his client is far more important right now than taking a moment to put down
the briefcase and cell phone he’s clutching. “The stairs are coming tomorrow.”
For the first time since she entered the house, a smile spreads across Jenny’s
face: “Now if you’d come here tomorrow instead, you’d
have found me in a much better mood.”
Lawson, 49, says Jenny’s feelings are completely understandable—and normal.
“People understand the tangible things they see—the Wolf range, the doors,
the trim,” he says. “But the infrastructure—‘Why all the
mud? What’s going on?’—they can’t understand it. But once all that
happens, it’ll come fast.”
Lawson, a Bethesda native who graduated from Walt
Whitman High School in 1974,
has spent the past 30 years working as a carpenter in the D.C. area. Recently,
though, he has begun to question how much longer he can keep up the difficult
manual labor required by his job.
One day this summer when the temperature broke 90 degrees, Lawson was clearing
debris out of the Brilliants’ master bedroom before air conditioning was installed.
Lawson remembers sweating profusely, then seeing stars and passing out. He
woke up and dragged himself downstairs to chug Gatorade.
He isn’t the only victim the house has claimed: An electrician slipped and
injured his back, and Kay Kim, the designer who works for the architecture
firm Rill & Decker and has been instrumental in laying out the project’s
details, tumbled down an unfinished staircase and dislocated his shoulder.
Kay asked Lawson to help him pop his shoulder back in, and said it didn’t
even hurt—until a few hours later, when the pain became so intense he had
to leave work for the day.
Lawson says that this incident made him realize he needed to make some changes
in his life: “I’ll be 50 this year. I have to start working smarter, not harder.
Every carpenter I know has back trouble, neck trouble or carpal tunnel [syndrome].”
So Lawson has decided to attend Montgomery College next year to study computer
courses relating to construction. He might also take Spanish classes, since
many of the subcontractors hired to work on construction projects in the Washington
area speak Spanish, and the language barrier can create problems.
One day Lawson told some drywallers to hang a certain wall near the Brilliants’
kitchen, but to leave another wall alone. When Lawson checked on their work
a few hours later, he discovered they’d reversed his directions.
It’s those sort of mishaps that aggravate the finely
tuned schedule Lawson and Connolly are keeping in an effort to move the renovation
along. But as with any construction project, delays seem inevitable, and Connolly
says sometimes they’re even necessary to ensure that quality work is being
done.
It’s not that Connolly doesn’t sympathize with how the Brilliants feel. Renovating
a house and dealing with the consequences—taking out a big loan, moving into
a temporary home (in the Brilliants’ case, into Jenny’s parents’ basement
in Potomac)—is one of the most stressful things you can do in life, he says.
But Connolly is keeping his eye on the big picture: The Brilliants plan to
live in their new home for a long time. That’s why Connolly hasn’t hesitated
to fire subcontractors whose work hasn’t been up to par—even if it has meant
delaying the project by a few days.
“It’s being done right,” Connolly says. “Done in a way
that will keep everyone happy…years from now.”
Jenny and Myron know they’ll be happy in the long run. It’s getting through
the next two months that has them worried. It’s bad enough that their three
children complain about missing their home and friends, and that everyone
in the family is spending stressful hours in the car commuting each day, rather
than minutes.
Other aggravations, both major and minor, keep cropping up. During the early
phase of construction, before windows were installed and anyone could slip
into the empty house at night, Jenny discovered her computer had been stolen
from the master bedroom. She blamed herself; Connolly had told her to remove
everything of value from the house.
She panicked, thinking of all the financial information stored on the computer.
Could she become a victim of identity theft on top of everything else? She
called the only person she could think of for advice: Bill Van Dyke, who had
arranged financing for the Brilliants’ construction loan. Only after Van Dyke
told her to alert the major credit bureaus did Jenny start to feel better.
Meanwhile, Myron, who travels frequently for his job as a vice president
of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, struggled with his own conflicting feelings
about the renovation. In a recent e-mail from Korea, Myron wrote about how
hard it has been for him to relinquish a sense of control over what is happening
to his house. “In some ways it has been difficult not to feel that our lives
are sort of on hold while our house is being worked on,” he wrote.
But just when it seems as though there isn’t any way the project will be
finished by mid-October, things begin to happen quickly. The deck off the
family room is laid, and interior stairs are installed. The wood floors go
down throughout the first floor, and kitchen cabinets go up. The mustard-green
kitchen cabinets have the feel of an old farmhouse and work beautifully with
the thick-planked wooden floors, which were reclaimed from an old barn.
Suddenly, the house is emerging, and it’s happening quickly, just like Lawson
promised.
Late one night, while still on his business trip to Korea, Myron typed
an e-mail about what moving back home would mean to him.
“It is the little simple things in life that I miss,” he wrote while he was
thousands of miles away from home—and feeling more homesick
than ever. “Whether it is walking to the Metro instead
of always having to rush out the door to get into a
car to go to work, or sitting on the couch with my legs
up in our family room with my son, Andrew, watching
the Maryland Terps play basketball,
or having friends over for weekend barbecues. You do
not realize how much you miss these simple pleasures
when you go without them for a long period of time.”
Chevy Chase writer Sarah Pekkanen has written
for the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, Washingtonian
and People.
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